by Isabela Garrido
Caracas, 26 May. AVN.- Once more, Venezuelan opposition asked the National Electoral Council to organize its primary elections, held on May 17 in order to choose, this time, its candidates for parliamentary elections scheduled for late 2015. It was a matter of an internal election that reaffirms the confidence in the automated voting system that, ironically, the opposition attempts to delegitimize every time it loses a ballot.
Even though revolutionary leader and expert in electoral issues, Jorge Rodriguez, called opposition primaries, “falsarias” (false primaries) for being the biggest failure of citizen participation in elections of the opposition with only 7.2% of registered voters, there are two positive aspects of this election to highlight: first, the use of the fingerprint scanners and second, the opposition did not use the voting notebooks.
“The only positive balance is that they can no longer say that the electoral system is fraudulent, that voting machines alter the results, and can not say anymore we can not use fingerprint scanners because in this election the Venezuelan right used voting machines, fingerprint readers and electronic notebooks,” Rodriguez said Monday at a press conference.
“They can not say that what helped them for their elections yesterday is not going to help when holding parliamentary election, nor claim fraud,” said the revolutionary leader.
This represents a significant step forward within a sector that has systematically used notebooks and fingerprint readers as a means to try to cast doubts on transparency and expertise of the Venezuelan electoral system.
On April 2014, after former presidential candidate Henrique Capriles lost elections against President Nicolas Maduro and claimed a “fraud” that left 11 people dead and a 100% audit of the polling stations, the right-wing used the voting notebooks as the main argument of its campaign against the electoral institution.
Capriles insisted that the notebooks should be reviewed, even though this is a residual of the manual system that was fully automated after a long process of research and investments which began in 1972 and consolidated in 2004 with the complete automation of a voting platform, continually being updated and considered the safest in the world.
The notebooks are actually a backwardness of manual system. Automation isolated any defect that could lead to electoral fraud, so widespread in the 1970s in Venezuela.
These notebooks used to be signed after the voter printed his or her choice through the voting machine. Given that they are hand tool, they are not exempt from human error, as for example voters who signed in the line which does not correspond to them or those who put their fingerprint and did not sign, or those that instead of signing, wrote a check mark on or a cross.
This is why authorities devised the use of fingerprint readers –improved machines now called Integrated Authentication System (SAI, Spanish acronym)– which are devices connected to each of the voting machines to identify voters through their fingerprint.
They safeguard the principle of “one voter, one vote” by identifying voter through fingerprint and preventing usurpation of a citizen in any form and also preventing double voting.
The use of these machines makes unnecessary the use of voting notebooks, as the SAI saves and supports data and fingerprints of voters who must be identified to enable the voting machines.
Rodriguez stressed that the Venezuelan electoral system is “so reliable that the opposition used it in their primaries”. This same system will organize the internal elections of Voluntad Popular (People’s Will) party, led by Leopoldo Lopez, currently being prosecuted for his involvement in the attempted coup and terrorist acts that left 43 people dead in 2014.