A collage of results from VZLA content. Photo: Diario Red.
By Román Cuesta — Aug 10, 2024
If María Corina Machado and Edmundo González won the elections and have the records to prove it… Why did they post these fake records?
Deconstructing the records from the VZLA website where the Venezuelan opposition posted the supposed records that gave them victory.
The Venezuelan government, which has already delivered the records in its possession to the Supreme Court, has not yet published them (the law gives it a period of 30 days after the elections). It would be pertinent for it to do so in order to be able to compare all the data.
Before examining the alleged records provided by the opposition, I believe it necessary to briefly explain how voting takes place in the Caribbean country and what protections are in place to prevent the manipulation of these records.
Voting process
Venezuela has one of the most reliable electronic voting systems on the planet. When the election day begins, the machines used in the process issue a record showing that all the candidates start with 0 votes; this is the so-called Initialization Record.
When Venezuelans arrive at their voting table, they are first identified by their fingerprint and then directed to a voting machine to exercise their right to vote.
This machine shows the photos and names of all the presidential candidates on screen. Once the user has decided their choice, they press their option on the screen and immediately a ticket is printed with the name of the chosen candidate and political party. The voter then deposits this ticket in a ballot box.
At the close of election day, table members, witnesses, and operators sign the Scrutiny Record on the screen, which includes the votes received by each candidate, broken down by political party.
The Scrutiny Records contain coding elements that serves as a certification of their authenticity. At the top appears a code, also called a “hash,” which is unique, unrepeatable, and serves to identify the record in the databases of the National Electoral Council (CNE).
At the bottom of the document is another code (the digital signature). This is generated by the MAC (medium access control) address of the machine. Every voting machine has a unique MAC address that corresponds solely to that specific device within the network. These two codes are used to verify the authenticity of the records.
The records also contain a QR code that, when scanned, shows the number of votes received by each of the parties, in the same order in which they appear. We must clarify that such codes do not offer guarantees of the authenticity of the records because it is possible to use a program that generates these codes — if it is the same one used by the machine (and the opposition) —to replace them with those that show the desired results.
In the image above, on the left, a sample generated by said program with the same data as the QR that appears on the right, and this corresponds to one of the Scrutiny Records. If one scans it, one will see that it provides the same results (knowing the application used by the machine, they would be identical and, therefore, easily manipulated.)
A phony QR code lacks verification elements like the hash code, which appears at the top, and the Digital Signature, at the bottom. The hash and Digital Signature are the only data in the record that cannot be manipulated.
Another irregularity that we have detected with respect to the QR is that they were altered through the use of a digital image-editing program. The picture below shows several examples of this manipulation.
Analyzing the results
The presidential elections in Venezuela were held on Sunday, July 28, 2024. Two days later, the candidate Edmundo González and María Corina Machado published a web page where they had posted the records that they claimed proved their victory.
I am will use an example from the complaint of one of the opposition candidates, José Brito, to show you how the falsification of one of these supposed records was carried out.
José Brito and his brother’s vote
José Brito, candidate for Primero Venezuela, showed, live on the Primera Página television program, two voting records that showed different results. He explained that the results had been modified and that the votes of his brother and some of his other relatives had disappeared from the results posted by the opposition.
This complaint was labeled false on social media networks by supporters of María Corina Machado and Edmundo González, based on the argument that the QR codes of both showed the same results. However, we have already proven how these codes are easily manipulated.
This strategy of disinformation does not hold up to scrutiny, as we will see below.
First, I must say that I began to download the records from the website as soon as they were published on July 30. Among them was the Initialization Record of table no. 2 of the República de Chile School Group, San Cristóbal parish, Bolívar municipality, Anzoátegui state, the same school where José Brito’s brother voted.
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This result no longer appears on the opposition’s page; it was purged and replaced by another one that we will study below.
In the image at the top of the records, we can see how all the data coincide except the time of printing. Logically, one is printed when the voting begins and counted when the process ends.
In the central part of the Initialization Record, it can be seen that all candidates have 0 votes at the beginning of the process.
The irregularities in the result posted by the opposition are revealed by the Digital Signatures, which do not match despite having been printed by the same machine. Recall that this Digital Signature is generated by the MAC address of the machine: an identifier that corresponds only and uniquely to that device within the network.
Between the results and the digital signature are the names and signatures of the members of the electoral table, the witnesses, and the operator of the machine, where we also find data that do not match and evidence that the signature on the second one has been manipulated.
Witness A, who signs the Initialization Record, is not the same as in the supposed Scrutiny Record, a fact that, as established by Venezuelan electoral law, must be reflected in said document. In addition, the signatures that appear in the latter would not withstand the most lax of handwriting examinations.
Brito could have mistaken the records, but it is evident that the records of votes from the tables located in the Grupo Escolar República de Chile that were posted by the opposition were manipulated.
This manipulation of signatures is repeated in hundreds of records and makes us suspect that the signatures collected in the Initialization Records were used to fabricate the fake counting records.
Here are several threads (1, 2, and 3) documenting groups of irregularities in the thousands of records posted by the VZLA.
To conclude, I leave you with a question: If María Corina Machado and Edmundo González won the elections and have the records to prove it, then why would they post these fake records? If they had posted accurate results, Maduro’s supporters would be left without any argument.
(Misión Verdad) by Román Cuestas
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/KW/SL/DZ
