Presidential Elections 2006
Venezuela
Scope
The 2006 Presidential Election was the fifth time that Smartmatic deployed its electoral technology. Approximately 32,331 voting machines were distributed nation-wide in about 11,000 voting centers. Of these, 10,532 were completely automated; only 468 were manual. In addition, some 52 "contingency" machines were distributed; one for each pilot center.
Smartmatic installed two National tally centers and 99 Contingency transmission centers. It also provided support for an Electoral Assembly, which input the manual registries and printed the bulletins. In fact, Smartmatic's services encompassed a wide range of items including hardware and software development, logistics, planning, operations, distribution, on-site supervision, and transmission. All of this facilitated an easy-to-use, efficient, and reliable electoral process.
Of Venezuela's 15,863,556 registered voters, 11,790.397 votes were tallied with SAES technology (74.69% of the census)—with a total of 11,630,152 (98.64%) valid votes and only 160,245 (1.35%) null votes. It's worth noting that, on average, it took to 20 seconds to vote, including the four seconds needed for the machine to print the paper ballot. The entire voting process averaged no more than 1 minute 20 seconds.
An outstanding 99.82% of the 32,331 voting machines installed in the 10,532 automated voting centers worked perfectly. About 11 million voter verifiable paper trails were printed, which were used for 17,00 closing audits. Only 80 automated voting machines, just 0.2% of the total, had to be replaced with manual voting.
Despite a highly polarized electorate and a politically tense atmosphere nation-wide, Smartmatic once again proved the efficiency of its automated voting system, under the strictest monitoring standards. It was a ringing endorsement of the company’s ability to deliver effective, reliable, and trustworthy technological solutions that contribute to the stability, harmony, and long-term benefit of the whole population.
