touchscreen voting to be used in Venezuela

["Paul Tiger" <paul.tiger@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

International Herald Tribune.- The New York Times

CARACAS Touch-screen voting machines, which have been plagued by security
and reliability concerns in the United States, will be used in the recall
vote on President Hugo Chávez, prompting his opponents and foreign diplomats
to contend that the left-leaning government may use the equipment to
manipulate the vote.
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A new touch-screen system, bought earlier this year by Chávez's government,
uses voting machines made by the Smartmatic Corp. of Florida and software
produced by a related company, the Bizta Corp. Neither company has
experience in an actual election.
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Furthermore, the Venezuelan government's electoral council said it would not
permit observers to run a simultaneous audit of the electronic vote counting
during the Aug. 15 recall, as electoral experts in the United States say is
common practice.
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"What is the dark reason for not doing this?" said Enrique Mendoza, an
opposition leader. "This is strange and not very transparent."
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In the United States, the touch-screen machines that have appeared in
numerous states in recent years have had some technical problems and have
been reviewed by security experts who found them lacking in safeguards
against computer hackers.
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That has led critics to say the systems are less secure than the mechanical
ones they replaced.
.
In April, California banned the use of 14,000 machines for November's
presidential elections, while Ohio issued a report that said electronic
voting machines from the four biggest companies in the field had serious
security flaws.
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One solution, electoral and computer experts say, is the use of manual
audits of the receipts the machines produce for every vote cast.
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"That is the most normal thing in an electoral process, and that they would
deny it is absurd," said a diplomat in Caracas who has closely monitored
elections here and in other Latin American countries. "What serious
electoral board would not permit an observation, as is done everywhere?"
That is what the opposition asked for here after the National Electoral
Council, the government's five-member electoral governing board, ruled on
June 3 that Chávez's adversaries had collected enough signatures to hold a
referendum.
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Chávez's opponents have suggested that an independent observer like the
Organization of American States audit the voting. But the electoral council
has opposed an audit, saying that as an autonomous body it would tally the
votes and ensure there was no fraud.
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Some pro-Chávez members of the council, in fact, have said that the OAS does
not need to monitor the election.
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Opposition leaders contend that three of the electoral council's five
members are partisan to the president, an opinion supported by diplomats.
Leaders of the Democratic Coordinator, an umbrella organization of
opposition groups, had first pushed for a manual count. But now the
opposition says it simply wants to carry out an audit of a sampling of the
votes, perhaps on as few as 400 of the 12,000 machines that are to be used.
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"We are not asking that they do an electoral count on all the receipts,"
said Jesús Torrealba, an opposition leader. "What we're asking for is a
statistical sampling."
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