Venezuelan Electoral Council Begins Audit of Voting Machines (Parliamentary Elections)
The National Electoral Council (CNE) began an audit process this Monday that will culminate on October 23rd, reviewing the hardware, software and data of voting machines, and including a review of the software source code and tests on the machines to confirm the system’s proper operation.
The audit was developed via streaming and as a ‘blended model.’ Engineer Ángel Elia, CNE technical specialist, explained the technical and technological characteristics of the voting machine. He indicated that the software is in responsible for carrying out the validation and authentication process of the identity of voters, registering the votes, carrying out the scrutiny process, and the process of transmitting the results of each voting table.
“To ensure transparency and security in their operation, political organizations have the opportunity to thoroughly review the software through source code analysis,” said Elia.
He also highlighted that the source code audit process consists of explaining each of the application’s modules and visually reviewing, or debugging, each of the instructions written in the source code.
He pointed out that thanks to the advances there’s a decrease in failures, because the system has components, and industrial design, of a greater resistance. “An autonomy of eight hours that allows voting to continue even with power failures; in addition, it has standard components that allow easy access to parts and spare parts,” said the engineer.
Elia also reported that the voting machine software has a contingency mechanism in case the hardware fails for some reason.
“A backup is kept in a removable memory, which is used to initialize the replacement machine and continue with the voting process,” explained the technical specialist.
It should be noted that this audit is part of the total of 16 audits that will be carried out throughout the electoral process that will take place on December 6.
The activity counted on the interaction, in real time, of electoral experts from the Latin American Council of Electoral Experts (CEELA) from Argentina, Turkey, Russia and South Africa, with national technical specialists present at the CNE’s Center for Strategic Operations. In this way, the Electoral Power guarantees the transparency of the process before, during and after the electoral event. This audit is part of the total of 16 that will be carried out throughout the electoral process.
In Venezuela, electoral audits have been established as one of the primary mechanisms to guarantee the transparency of the results obtained in each voting process, with this the country advancing in the process of renewing its Parliament, and the CNE guarantees compliance with the electoral schedule, taking into account the principles of democracy, reliability, transparency, speed and efficiency.
Featured image: File photo.
Translation: OT/JRE/SL
