Unsatisfied with the new electoral laws favorable to his political party, Evo Morales is now seeking to impose a biometric registration system throughout Bolivia – a tactic used by his mentor in Caracas.

In the name of modernization and technological advancement, the system will be utilized, not to make the voting experience easier and more secure for the average Bolivian citizen, but for the political advantage of the MAS (Movement Toward Socialism), Evo’s political party.

If we use the Venezuelan experience as a measure, what this means is that, if ratified, this law will remove all vestiges of transparency within the Bolivian voting system, taking away control of the electoral process from the people and putting it in the hands of a "highly specialized" group of systems engineers.

According to Smartmatic, the creator of the Automatic Voting System (SAV), the SAV and its biometric component was established to “facilitate a transparent and secure right to vote." But in Venezuela, election officials jealously guard details about the way its system operates. Such information is reserved for the manufacturer and the members of the National Electoral Commission (CNE).

So, after a vote is cast, the system carries out an unknown number of calculations and processes that are supposed to collect, transmit, and total the number of votes, leaving the future of Venezuela forever in the hands of governmental "good faith."

To illustrate this point, it is important to consider the findings of the report of the Technical Monitoring Group (GST) that struggled to audit the operation of the SAV for the Venezuelan presidential elections in December 2006.

According to the GST report, the CNE prevented its auditors from carrying out a formal audit, and blocked their access to basic information required to perform an audit. The GST was also prevented from obtaining information about the complete list of voting machines and servers that collect all the information, the procedures for applications development, and the names and roles of officials involved in the process, among other important information.

In the report, the GST lists a significant number of technical irregularities in the system, which include: the use of pen drives (which increase the possibility of altering information in an improper way) and the absence of assurances that the password required for data transmission is not given to unauthorized personnel.

Finally, the report notes that the GST system for capturing fingerprints, intended primarily to identify impostors, transmits information about the voter and his or her votes, destroying any vestige of a secret ballot, which is the bedrock of democratic elections.

In Venezuela, this same biometric system has been utilized as a tool for rigging elections, a suspicion that was recently verified by CIA cybersecurity expert Steve Stigall in a field hearing of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission in Orlando, Florida. This same system has even been criticized by security experts for promulgating international banking fraud.

In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez has utilized the biometric voting system since 2004 to rig both elections and the referenda that allows him to be “elected” for life. Shortly we will witness whether this ace up the sleeve of the Morales administration will allow him to achieve his main objective: to eliminate electoral transparency and the small amount of Bolivian democracy that remains, all in the name of modernization.

* Eneas Biglione is the executive director of the Hispanic American Center for Economic Research (HACER) in Washington DC.

---
Read the full report of the GST here.

Labels: Bolivia