http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/11/international/americas/11vene.html

June 11, 2004

Venezuelan Recall Is in Dispute Even Before the Vote

By Juan Forero and John Schwartz

CARACAS, Venezuela, June 10 - Touch-screen voting machines, which have been plagued by security and reliability concerns in the United States, will be used in the recall vote on President Hugo Chávez, prompting his foes and foreign diplomats to contend that the left-leaning government may use the equipment to manipulate the vote.

A new touch-screen system here, bought earlier this year by Mr. Chávez's government, uses voting machines made by the Smartmatic Corporation of Boca Raton, Fla., and software produced by a related company, the Bizta Corporation, also of Florida. Neither company has experience in an actual election.

Furthermore, the Venezuelan government's electoral council said it would not permit observers to run a simultaneous audit of the electronic vote counting during the Aug. 15 recall, as electoral experts in the United States said is common practice.

"What is the dark reason for not doing this?" said Enrique Mendoza, an opposition leader. "This is strange and not very transparent."

In the United States, the touch-screen machines that have appeared in numerous states in recent years have had some technical glitches, and have been reviewed by security experts who found them lacking in safeguards against hackers. That has led critics to argue the systems are less secure than the mechanical ones they replaced.

In April, California banned the use of 14,000 of the machines for this November's presidential elections, while the state of Ohio issued a report that said electronic voting machines from the four biggest companies in the field have serious security flaws.

Earlier this week, the head of the United States Election Assistance Commission said that voting machine companies should make the inner workings of their software open to inspection by states that purchase it.

One solution, electoral and computer experts say, is the use of manual audits of the receipts the machines produce for every vote cast.

"That is the most normal thing in an electoral process, and that they would deny it is absurd," said a diplomat in Caracas who has closely monitored elections here and in other Latin countries. "What serious electoral board would not permit an observation, as is done everywhere?"

That is what the opposition has asked for here after the National Electoral Council, the government's five-member electoral governing board, ruled on June 3 that Mr. Chávez's adversaries had collected enough signatures to hold a referendum. The council this week said the recall, which would succeed if the opposition collects nearly 3.8 million votes, would take place Aug. 15.

Mr. Chávez's opponents have suggested that an independent observer like the Organization of American States or the Atlanta-based Carter Center, audit the signatures.

But the electoral council has opposed an audit, saying that as an autonomous body it would tally the votes and ensure there is no fraud. Some pro-Chávez members of the council, in fact, have suggested that the O.A.S. does not need to monitor the election, or that its role should be restricted.

Opposition leaders contend that three of the electoral council's five members are partisan to the president, an opinion echoed by diplomats in Caracas.

Leaders of the Democratic Coordinator, an umbrella group of opposition groups, had initially pushed for a manual count. But now the opposition says it simply wants to carry out an audit of a sampling of the votes, perhaps on as few as 400 of the 12,000 machines that are to be used.

"We are not asking that they do an electoral count on all the receipts," said Jesús Torrealba, an opposition leader. "What we're asking for is a statistical sampling."

The government has raised a host of questions since announcing earlier this year that it was replacing voting machines made by a Spanish firm, Indra, with Smartmatic's equipment. The Miami Herald reported in May that the Venezuelan government had invested in Bizta, a new company that makes the software to be used in the machines.

Efforts to obtain comment from the National Electoral Council and the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington were unsuccessful. Officials for Smartmatic and Bizta referred calls to a spokeswoman, who did not return two phone calls.

Government officials have publicly said, however, there is no impropriety and played down the role of the government in Bizta's operations. Jorge Rodríguez, a council member who is considered a Chávez loyalist, accused critics of having "hidden interests."

But experts said that without independent oversight, voting machines can be easily tampered with.

Touch-screen voting machines bear similarities, but each company designs its machine in its own way, and the software varies widely from company to company. Still, experts note that a review for the state of Ohio of hardware and software used by the four largest vendors of touch-screen voting machines found serious security flaws.

"A fully electronic computer can be programmed to produce whatever outcome the developers - or the people in charge of the developers - want it to," said Aviel D. Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University.

Mr. Rubin led a team last year that performed the first rigorous security analysis of software used in machines by Diebold Election Systems, an industry leader in the United States. "Anybody who was really concerned with a fair outcome would encourage as far an outside review of the machines as possible," he said.

Glitches and tampering with voting machines has been seen before in Latin America, where there is a long history of stolen elections.

The government of then-President Alberto K. Fujimori stole the 2000 Peruvian presidential election. Days before, the O.A.S. examined the software used in the machines and found technical problems that would permit manipulation.

The Fujimori government, though, refused to make corrections, and the O.A.S. abandoned the country before the election. The government was later accused of fraud in the election. Mr. Fujimori resigned soon after.

Mr. Rubin said it is crucial to ensure that the companies chosen to supply machines and software be experienced and have a proven track record, particularly in an election as important as Venezuela's.

Juan Forero reported from Caracas for this article, and John Schwartz from New York.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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