Paper Vote Canada

Súmate, Venezuela's most important non-governmental election watchdog, also strongly contradicted many of Carter's claims. Carter insists that "international machines were tested in advance" and that "extra care was taken to ensure secrecy and accuracy," the Journal reported, while Súmate says that the original recall rules called for manual voting.

Chávez insisted on importing an electronic system and chose Smartmatic voting machines without a transparent bidding process. One ostensible reason for going with Smartmatic was that its machines also create paper ballots, which could be used to audit the vote. But as it turned out, an impartial audit of those ballots was not allowed.

Súmate also revealed that there was a "severe limitation to participation in the auditing required by any automated voting system: Auditing the software used by the machines was never permitted, the source code was never released, and finally, access was never allowed into the Totalization Room of CNE [National Electoral Council]."

But Carter keeps repeating in the press that Súmate had the same "quick count" as he did. This only creates confusion, because "quick count" totals are merely the sum of totals coming from Chávez-controlled voting software. The Journal says that the only way to have checked the accuracy of the government's claim of "victory" was to count ballots.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 8:13 am