EUGENIO MARTÍNEZ
EL UNIVERSAL

More and better conditions. This is the way to sum up the set of technical assurances given by the National Electoral Council (CNE) for the constitutional referendum.

Before the establishment of 33,614 polling stations, 13 checks were made to the voting system, including two novel audits.

As usual, CNE,  before attesting witnesses and accredited technicians for the No and Yes factions, checked and audited the hardware and software of 33,939 voting machines and 11,929 fingerprint reading machines; analyzed the counting systems; reviewed the engineering of the whole election infrastructure; audited the source codes both of machines and 33,614 voting rolls; analyzed digitally last year movement in the registry of voters, and ensured, by means of a pre-delivery or zero-error audit, that the audited equipments and materials had been sent with no changes to the 11,131 polling stations.

For the first time, CNE directors allowed for a thorough review of the data transmission systems used by telecommunications company Cantv. At the request of the faction favoring the No vote, the chemical composition and manufacturing of the indelible ink was tested.

But most important will be an audit to be conducted on Sunday night, after the polls end. The closing or post-audit will help match the content of 178,787 boxes that safeguard voting vouchers with the minutes printed out by each machine before disseminating the results to the CNE counter center.

Such a review will help to prove the results transmitted by 54 percent of the polling machines, as it happened during the election for president in 2006.

Additional assurances
CNE directors undertook to restrict the action of the officers with Plan República, the electoral security and protection operation, to tasks related exclusively to safeguard of polling stations and transfer of the voting materials to the municipal and state boards after the polls.

Some new issues include the fact that the witnesses accredited for the two factions will have access to the CNE counter center and Cantv data transmission center.

Additionally, fingerprint reading machines will be used again in eight states, and for the first time, they will be unplugged from CNE servers.

Translated by Conchita Delgado