Capriles still defiant on eve of Venezuela vote recount

[reorg]

17. "Capriles' problem in the OP"

has indeed nothing to do with the source code of the software used in the election and the tabulation of the votes.

Although he loudly demanded in front of TV cameras that all ballot boxes need to be opened and although he stated numerous times that every single ballot must be counted and checked against the electronic count (while making hand gestures indicating the process of hand-counting), he now completely dismisses this process, once his "recount" was granted by the CNE.

Instead, he now insists that all 15 million fingerprints and signatures need to be rechecked and re-verified. (Oh, and BTW, why are you not protesting this? What happened to your conspiracy theory about the secret archives with fingerprints and allocated votes?)

Next he will demand interviews with each invidivual voter to verify if they actually checked their receipts and really put them into the box themselves.


Regarding the problem that had been detected during previous audits of the election software, it only goes to show that audits took place and delivered results. It had nothing to do with the tabulation of the votes, as you very well know. Here is the comment about it from the EU observers in 2005:

The EU EOM was present at the audit session of 23 November and had the possibility to observe the events in its entirety. The possibility of endangerment of the secrecy of the vote was evaluated by EU EOM experts as remote. The breach of the secrecy of the vote could only be possible if the sequence of both the identification of the voters and the votes cast was reconstructed. This reconstruction would require access to three different dispersed sources of information by a qualified user. These sources are the VM memory, the SAVs memory and the entire encryption key code (divided among the political parties and the CNE) used in the system to protect the voting data. In addition to that, the EU EOM is of the opinion that this possibility was truly due to a mistake from the CNE and Smartmatic and not to a fraudulent attempt to reconstruct the voting sequence. (page 27)

Footnote: Smartmatic and CNE main developers were present during the audit and actually presenting the system. During the entire audit sessions, they did not appear to try to hide anything. Even when the analysis on the reconstruction of the voting sequence became deeper and deeper, CNE and Smartmatic and CNE staff remained open and very confident. When the bug was revealed they were obviously taken by surprise. They had no strategy to justify it and made no attempts to play down the issue.

http://eeas.europa.eu/eueom/pdf/missions/finalreportenversion.pdf