Venezuela’s opposition led by Maria Corina Machado has posted more than 24,000 tally sheets online that it claims are authentic after official numbers from Sunday’s presidential election were not published on Monday morning.
The National Electoral Council of Venezuela (CNE) announced at midnight after election day that, with 80% of the tables counted, the president Nicolas Maduro had won with 51.2% of the votes, compared to 44.2% obtained by the opponent supported by Machado, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia.
These results were questioned by both the opposition and several countries in the region, which requested everything from the official publication of the minutes to the recognition of González Urrutia as the elected president of Venezuela.
The President of ColombiaGustavo Petrosaid on Wednesday in X that there are “serious doubts” surrounding the Venezuelan electoral process.
“I invite the Venezuelan government to allow the elections to end in peace, allowing for a transparent vote count, with the recording of votes, and with oversight by all political forces in the country and professional international oversight,” he requested.
His Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silvatold a TV Globo affiliate on Tuesday that the process was “normal and calm,” but also noted the need for the minutes to be shown.
“How do you resolve the dispute? By presenting the minutes,” he said.
The opposition, a coalition led by the Democratic Unity Roundtable, He maintains that his candidate won with 67.2% compared to Maduro’s 30.4% with almost 82% of the votes digitized.
“With the missing votes, even if the CNE gave 100% of the votes to Maduro, what we already have would not be enough. The difference was so big, so big, overwhelming, in all the states of Venezuela, in all the strata, in all the sectors, we won,” said Machado on Monday afternoon.
In total there were 30,026 polling stations in around 15,000 polling stations.
On the website resultadosconvzla.com, the opposition published the results of its vote count with copies of the minutes it claims to have obtained, by state, municipality, parish, voting center and table.
He also created the page resultadospresidencialesvenezuela2024.com so that anyone can enter an ID number and see the minutes of the table where they were supposed to vote, as long as it is among those they claim to have obtained.
What are the minutes of the vote count?
Voting in Venezuela is electronic.
This means that when a citizen goes to his or her voting table, he or she identifies himself or herself with his or her fingerprint and then goes to a machine to vote.
As soon as the election day begins, that machine issues a report showing that all candidates start with 0 votes.
The machine then displays photos of the presidential candidates on the screen and the voter must choose his or her preference.
In doing so, the machine prints a ticket with the name of the chosen candidate and political party, which the voter then places in a ballot box.
When voting is closed, the members of the table, witnesses and operators sign the counting report on the screen, which includes the number of votes received by each candidate, broken down by political party.
Maduro was supported in these elections by 13 parties -the main one being the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV)-, while González Urrutia was supported by three.
The original of the counting report is then printed on the voting machine.
The device sends the voting results at that table to the CNE via dedicated lines encrypted with three layers of security – not via the Internet – which is responsible for compiling and adding up the information.
Witnesses from different parties then receive paper copies, which are also issued by that machine.
If the machine was selected for citizen verification, its corresponding ballot box is opened and the digital information is compared with the manual count. Otherwise, the ballot box with the votes only remains as a physical backup.
What security measures does each record have?
The voting records in Venezuela have certain coding elements that allow their veracity to be certified.
On the one hand, they include the circuit number and table to which they correspond.
Secondly, they have a code called a “hash”.
According to Venezuelan journalist Eugenio Martínez, who specializes in electoral issues, the hash code is “unique, unrepeatable, and serves to identify the record in the CNE databases.”
The date and time the report was issued is also displayed.
At the bottom of the document there is another code, which is generated between the MAC address of the machine – an identifier that corresponds only and uniquely to that device within the network – and the specific election data, explained Martínez, director of the Votoscopio site.
“Both the lower code and the upper code in the report are those that would be used in a hypothetical audit that would allow the CNE to have independent experts verify the authenticity of the report,” he added.
The record also has a QR code that, when scanned, shows the voting circuit and table number, and the number of votes received at that table for each of the parties in the same order as they appear in writing above on the same receipt.
Is it possible to falsify voting records?
Since the CNE has not yet made public the minutes of each table, it is not possible to compare them with those released by the opposition to determine whether they are the same or different.
In the event that any of the records disappear, the voting machines can reprint them once they have been returned to the CNE, a task that ends on Friday, Martinez said.
If the CNE were to print the records stored in the machines’ memory again, the hash, date and time, and digital signature would change.
“Let’s suppose that the CNE publishes the minutes of table 1 of municipality X, and it is compared with the minutes of table 1 of municipality X that the opposition has and they do not match. What is the real minutes? We must then verify the previously audited database where the hash of the scrutiny minutes was recorded, how the hash is generated and how the digital signature of the minutes is generated,” he explained.
He added that the formula for calculating these codes is in the database.
If two records from the same voting table appear with the same hash code and digital signature, but with different data on the number of votes, the system provides that the ballot boxes stored in the CNE can be returned to and the manual counting can be carried out.
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