Municipal and Parish Elections 2005
Venezuela

Scope

For the Municipal and Parish Elections, 310 regional, and 70 regional political parties nominated 32,002 candidates for councilors and Parish assembly seats. 3,000 candidates were selected by elector groups, and a further 3,606 ran as independents on their own platforms. In all, a total of 35,274 citizens were nominated for 5,618 elected offices.

An event of such magnitude and technical complexity (i.e., dealing with the number of candidates, alliance changes, handling of the electronic ballots per municipality, etc.) required the deployment of 25,671 voting machines. The machines were installed and functioning in record time, and they worked perfectly in 99.2% of cases.  The transmission process in 85% of the machines took less than two hours, and the tallying of partial results was done in just 30 minutes.

The average voting time with SAES technology was just 90 seconds, which included the four seconds that the printer takes to print the voting voucher. Smartmatic proved its versatility, user-friendliness and reliability in the support of an important election.