Municipal and Parish Elections 2005
Venezuela
Audits
The SAES voting technology underwent several tests and technical evaluations before the Municipal and Parish Elections, such as:
END2END test (June 21st, 2005)
A quality control test of a sample 120 SAES voting machines to be used in the Municipal and Parish Elections. Votes were input continuously until the time of transmission. Once the voting had concluded, a validation of the voting registry and the tallying of the entire sample was done.
Engineering test (June 22nd and 29th, 2005)
The CNE (Consejo Nacional Electoral/National Electoral Council) conducted electoral data transmission tests on a national scale in order to validate the technological infrastructure. There were 694 SAES voting machines tested: two in each of the 335 Municipal Assemblies—268 municipal assemblies with wireless transmission, and 67 with satellite transmission—and one in each Electoral Regional Office.
Programming process audit (July 6th, 2005)
Key members of the political parties, as well as Smartmatic and CNE technicians met to begin the audit process for the voting machines’ programming, which concluded two days later, on July 8th. During the first phase (which lasted from May 7th until July 30th), Smartmatic technicians explained the process by which the voting machines were prepared. The second phase corresponded to explanations about the voting machine modules manager.
Voting trial (July 10th and 24th, 2005)
6,500 SAES machines for the 335 Municipal Assemblies were employed, and around 9,000 CNE and Smartmatic operators and technicians worked on each one of these simulations. The timing allowed them to simulate potential failures and to activate the possible contingency plans in the event a failure occurred during the actual August 7th elections. The process had an operational success rate of 95% and the tallying process was 100% accurate.
Pre-election audit (July 31st, 2005)
Once programming for all of the 26,535 SAES machines to be used in the Municipal and Parish Elections was completed, 130 randomly selected voting machines (0.5% of the total) were audited. In this “zero error” audit it was proven, yet again, that the SAES voting solution provides accurate results, with a numerical inconsistency margin of close to 0%.
Closing audit (August 7th, 2005)
For this particular event, over 6,500 audits were undertaken after voting concluded. The audit consisted of opening the ballot boxes—one for each voting center—and comparing the ballots to the electronic voting registry. These audits confirmed that the electoral results were 100% accurate. In each of these instances, Smartmatic technology demonstrated its quality, reliability and accuracy.
