Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
How will the 2012 Venezuelan election be like?
This is the solution, the voting machine you all know, which will have two new sidekicks this time,
if you will: a new generation e-ballot and the RSA, the Integrated Authentication System.
With this we’ll automate all 7 stages of voting.
What other countries are doing something similar?
Several other countries are promoting this method; organizations like the UNDP have as a requirement (in order
to give financial help to countries to strengthen their democracies) that voting registers must contain biometric info.
So, the use of biometrics is one of the steps necessary to reach level 4 of automation.
Brazil is already using biometrics, not nationally but they’ve been doing it since 2008;
they have a device they call the “polling station member terminal”,
which like the RSA has a fingerprint reader used to compare the voter’s biometric info with the one on records,
a step necessary to activate the voting session.
In fact, Brazil’s operation is, minus the printing of voting receipts (a difference I think is of the upmost importance and which benefits Venezuela),
very similar to ours.
Speaking of our new devices, our new e-ballot is actually a new generation,
a step above the VP300, our traditional ballot which you most likely know.
What benefits does this ballot bring? The first one is what we call Total-Sense Technology,
with which one doesn’t have to press directly on the oval to make a choice anymore; now any area associated with the
option works (e.g. a picture, a logo, the candidate’s name, etc.)
If you press on any area, the selection will be made. Besides, there will be auditory feedback and visual feedback
in-situ -that is in the ballot- so that your attention focus doesn’t need to change.
I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but if you check videos on Youtube of people voting, you will see that some people have
this pattern while voting with multiple ballots: they fill out the first, check the screen, fill out the second, check the screen, and so forth.
This obviously makes the process a little slower. With the VP1500, our new ballot, this shouldn’t happen because of two
reasons: first, because you have a visual indicator, and second, due to the size we built them (maybe a little big for some of you).
This choice in size was the result of an analysis; we aimed to reduce the cases where more than a ballot was needed to practically zero.
Hypothetically, even in a mega-voting day with a significant number of offices and candidates to be elected,
over 90% of the jurisdictions would only need one ballot thanks to its size.
Secondly, we have the Integrated Authentication System (SAI), which will be connected to each voting machine.
The elector will go to his polling station, place his fingerprint on it, it will be checked against the biometric
info in the machine to make sure that person is who he claims to be, and if the info matches, the voting session will be activated,
guaranteeing the principle we’ve always tried to guarantee, namely “one voter equals one vote”.
It’s important to clarify that these devices have nothing to do with the so-called “fingerprint capturing machines” used
in the past; Smartmatic never had anything to do with those, that system was developed by a third party.
This system is leaving the Venezuelan scenario, being replaced by the SAI.
Later, we’ll talk in detail about each of these components.
As I said, the device guarantees the principle of “one voter equals one vote”, since the activation of the session is biometric.
Each machine has the fingerprint of the voters cleared to use it, so there can’t be impersonation or multiple voting.
The secrecy of voting is guaranteed, since the system operates logically as 2 subsystems:
one for the voting per se and one for authentication, both of which have clearly stated logical barriers between them so things that happen in one don’t affect the other,
except for the authentication tokens, where the authentication subsystem communicates a successful authentication to the voting one.