Auditors: CNE’s Automated Voting System is solid and guarantees electoral transparency

The voting system of the National Electoral Council, CNE, complies with all the basic principles to carry out free and transparent elections, as reported this Monday by the auditor and Doctor in Computer Science, Emilio Hernández, in the General Balance of the Integral Audit of the Automated System Voting.

From a press conference held from the CNE headquarters and broadcast by Venezolana de Televisión, Hernández stressed that “the automated system of CNE has accustomed us Venezuelans to having the results on the same night as the voting, and this has contributed to social peace”.

“We have found that the system fully complies with these objectives, to give a precise scrutiny, to do it as quickly as possible, and as well as guarantee the privacy of the voters, nor that there is forgery of identity”, told the auditor to the Communication media.

Regarding the software, Hernández pointed out that “the system does not show names of candidates, therefore it is not possible to anticipate winners until the final vote count has been made, so any suspicion of possible fraud is almost impossible with the voting system”.

The group of 10 experts from the informatics-computational area that carried out this review for six weeks, validated in a press conference the functionality of all the programs and applications, the technological infrastructure, the means of transmission and the phase of aggregation of electoral results.

It transpired that the group of auditors will formulate recommendations for the long term, “including the possibility that the programs can migrate to free software, that the general public can know it in detail and reinforce both technical audits and those carried out by organizations with political purposes before each election”.

For his part, also auditor Robinson Díaz, Master in Computer Science and director of the UCV School of Computing, pointed out that the electoral system is complex and highlighted the hard work carried out by the auditors.

He specified that after this general audit they were able to determine that “the secrecy of the vote, the reliability of the vote, the security of the data: everything was corroborated and verified”.

For her part, doctor in Computer Sciences Joali Moreno (UCV) pointed out that the review of the technological infrastructure and the transmission media were incorporated into the agenda and developed to the satisfaction of the auditors by the technicians of the CNE and the CANTV and Movilnet companies.

Similarly, engineer Antonio Russoniello (UCV) also referred to the meeting held last week by the group of academic experts with representatives of the Technical Mission of the European Union that recently visited the country.

The auditors agreed to highlight the total freedom they had to request tests and delve into their requirements from the specialists, even suggesting changes in the review methodology that were accepted by the conductors of the activity.

It was known that in the next few days the final report of the audit will be presented to the authorities of the Electoral Power.