VENEZUELA: Recall Referendum Generates Business Opportunities

By Humberto Márquez Reprint | | Print |

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Jul 29 2004 (IPS) - The Aug. 15 recall referendum for President Hugo Chávez has millions of Venezuelans on tenterhooks, with the exception of a group of young technologists and entrepreneurs who are rubbing their hands in glee over a new and juicy business opportunity worth more than 150 million dollars.

This binding referendum – the first of its kind in Latin America – also heralds the national debut of an automated voting system and an electronic fingerprint identification system. Both are based on state-of-the-art technology but neither is immune from the anxiety and suspicion which pervade a political scene sharply polarised for and against Chávez.

"Show me my vote will be secret, because if I put my finger on the screen my fingerprint will be left there," Sonia Campos, a restaurant worker, said to María González, a computer systems technician hired to teach passersby in a central Caracas subway station how to use the new voting machines.

"I assure you that you could vote with your nose should you so wish. This screen cannot read your fingerprint, there is a separate machine to do that," González replied before IPS and a dozen curious and amused members of the public queuing to try out the voting machine.

Each voter must place their left thumb on a finger-print reading machine in order to enter the polling stations. The machine will compare their digital thumb-print with those of people who have already voted, preventing citizens from voting more than once.

In order to do this, the National Electoral Council (CNE) bought 12,000 laptops and software from the U.S. Chinese consortium Cogent Systems, on a contract worth more than 66 million dollars.

This move will render obsolete the method used for several decades, where the authorities tried to prevent double or triple voting by wiping indelible ink on the little finger of each voter’s right hand.

But when the broad opposition movement announced it had collected the 2.5 million signatures needed to activate a referendum against Chávez, the CNE discovered that several thousand of the names were repeated or belonged to people who were dead.

Now, after the voter passes the finger-print filter, they will be free to vote at any of the 19,600 machines that will be posted throughout the nation to take their ballot, tally it and transmit the result.

This computer system was the product of a contract won by a consortium led by Smartmatic, a company founded in the United States by Venezuelan engineers.

Votes will be cast with the touch screen method, with the voter touching the word "Yes" to recall Chávez or "No" to allow him to complete his term, on terminals the size of a desktop printer. These devices were assembled by the Italian company Olivetti for Smartmatic, under a subcontract worth 24 million dollars.

In mid-July a dummy election was held in 4,000 voting centres, where voters were invited to choose between the Caracas Leones (Lions) or the Magallanes Navegantes (Sailors), the two most popular professional baseball teams in the country.

The outcome of the trial was not made public to prevent election campaigners on either side from using the information for propaganda purposes (Chávez is a staunch Magallanes fan).

The machine will print out a "receipt", or physical proof of voting, on heat-sensitive paper, which the voter will then place in a ballot box in front of polling station staff. These slips will serve monitoring purposes, because the receipts must match the electronic votes.

Between 85 and 90 percent of Venezuela’s 13.8 million registered voters will be able to attend computerised polling stations on Aug. 15. The rest, in small or remote towns, will be using ballot papers with manual scrutiny, as was the case throughout Venezuela up until 1998, when Chávez was first voted president.

The Smartmatic consortium is charging 63 million dollars for the voting terminals and computer programmes. A further 27 million will be paid for transmission network services and machine and system operators contracted through their partner, Venezuela’s CANTV telephone company.

"This is the most secure and auditable system on the market. The machine assigns, registers and prints a 16-digit code for each vote, mixing numbers and letters randomly, and dependent on the temperature and vibration registered by its components, which will make it impossible to falsify even one of the votes," Smartmatic CEO Antonio Mugica told the press.

The opposition "would have preferred that a straightforward election like this, deciding ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, would be carried out with ballot papers and a manual scrutiny system. But now that the CNE has taken another route, all we can do is demand guarantees that the system is trustworthy," Leopoldo Puchi, leader of the opposition Democratic Coordinator alliance, told IPS.

The Democratic Coordinator accepted the voting machines, because electoral law allows for their use, but they have questioned the use of the finger-print systems. Programmes to compare finger-prints slow down as the database grows, and the opposition fears that use of the machines may trigger a collapse in the system half-way through the day on Aug. 15.

Cogent points to its experience in state, municipal and police fingerprint registers in the United States, and released a communiqué saying its system is the fastest for comparing fingerprints, reaching a million comparisons per second.

Within the government and ruling coalition there is also apprehension in the face of the flood of new technology. Vice-President José Vicente Rangel expressed his fear that CANTV, whose main shareholder is the U.S. company GTE, could manipulate data transmitted via its network to tip the vote in favour of the opposition.

Rangel called on Chávez supporters to be prepared to take to the streets if necessary to defend a possible triumph.

Gustavo Roosen, head of CANTV – a former public enterprise that was privatised in 1991 during the second term of Carlos Andrés Pérez, a fierce Chávez opponent – met this month with Rangel to give assurances of transparency in the process and to request supervision from the government telecommunications body.

"Our transmission technology is as reliable as that used by the Crédit Suisse bank to transfer 500 million dollars to Chase Manhattan," said Mugica proudly.

"Data travels in encrypted form between the polling station and the vote-tallying centre, and it is transmitted in 30 seconds. The chances of a hacker intervening to change this are, mathematically speaking," zero point 199 zeros with one digit at the end.

Mugica, a 30-year-old systems engineer, is one of those rubbing his hands together, because "If we prove this product works under conditions as difficult as those in Venezuela, we can sell it anywhere in the world."

"We are working on sales promotion in five Latin American countries. I can list Chile, Colombia and Mexico," Mugica told IPS. "And we have our eyes on the state of Florida in the United States."

In its short lifespan, Smartmatic has mostly worked with security systems for banking networks.

However, the scandalous complications in Palm Beach, Florida during the U.S. presidential elections in 2000 "made us realise the voting systems were not very reliable, and we decided to enter the business with this new product," said Mugica.

Ballot recounts in the Florida election meant delays of several weeks before U.S. President George W. Bush was finally confirmed the winner.