Regional Elections 2004
Venezuela
Audits
The technological platform of the SAES3000 voting machines for these regional elections were audited on different occasions:
Engineering test (October 23, 2004). This drill covered the entry of Manual Acts, the certification and transmission of vote summaries, the generation of bulletins, tally auxiliaries and generation of Acts of Adjudication. Tests results showed the treatment and tally of manual and electronic ballots functioned perfectly throughout the system. The transmission test covered the incorporation and transmission of data from the 335 municipal juntas, 23 regional juntas y 2 district juntas to the Tally Center from the National Electoral Commission (CNE by its acronym in Spanish) through the communication channels provided by CANTV. Direct connections were made from each electoral council and the operation was monitored from the CNE.
National Electoral Drill (October 10, 2004). 2500 automated voting centers were used, each one of them with a SAES3000 voting machine and the electronic ballot according to the municipality. A National Tallying Center was functioning at the CNE and the National Backup Tallying Center, the Monitoring and Control Center and the Backup and Control Center were functioning at CANTV. More than 9.000 operators and technicians took part in the drill.
Previous Audit or Pre-voting Audit (October 28, 2004). For the auditing process 118 SAES3000 machines were randomly chosen. This represents a 0.5% out of the 23.594 voting machines available for the regional elections. Technicians and operators from 40 auditing groups casted their votes in each of the machines, following the guidelines agreed upon. The voting receipts were placed in an envelope in order to compare those results to the vote summary that is in the machine. In every one of cases the good quality and performance of SAES could be seen, making it a reliable and accurate tool.
Once the event was over, the closing auditing and a general auditing were carried out (November 2, 2004). The President of the electoral power at that time, said that two types of auditing had been performed: the right away audit, which means opening a ballot box in every voting center on the day of the election in front of the members of the voting table, the witnesses from each of the candidates and the media; and the other audit in which you take 1% out of the 5.340 ballot boxes opened on the election day in order to evaluate them more thoroughly.
