Curaçao's parliamentary elections, 2010: Audits

Our whole approach to elections is based around the idea that all political parties must be able to audit the process at every stage.

This way, everyone is able to accept the results as accurate.

A key feature of our technology – and one that has become the de facto standard around the world – is that the voting machines produce a paper receipt that enables every voter to check their own choice has been made correctly.

This has become known as the voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT). It also means that electoral commissions can check paper counts against electronic counts to check there are no discrepancies.

In the 2.3 billion votes Smartmatic technology has processed since 2004, we’ve never discovered a single discrepancy. We believe this is evidence that votes are completely safe in our machines. This is thanks to our encryption, the system’s redundancy and accuracy.

We also took several other steps to ensure everyone knew the system was functioning properly.

For these elections, we implemented a quality control test on a sample number of voting machines.

We also ran a simulation to test the entire technology platform and identify any faults.

We even simulated certain extreme conditions, to see how the system would respond.