2023-10-17 07:01:00
There are 15 days left until the elections on October 29, which promise to shake up the regional political chess. Although security and the growing threat of armed groups and criminal gangs set the course in terms of electoral risks, there is one issue that seems to be slipping through the cracks: the alerts surrounding technological systems to protect elections and guarantee transparency.
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Today the questions are related to the way in which, through software, the more than 800,000 voting jurors were chosen, but there are growing alarms regarding the digital tools to carry out the scrutiny, the millionaire amounts behind the processes to acquire technology or the location of electoral witnesses and delegates at the voting stations. How at risk are the elections?
The matter was once again put on the table in the last Commission for the Coordination and Monitoring of Electoral Processes, where the Registry Office, the Government, civil society organizations and other entities sit to analyze this type of situations.
There, a topic was reviewed that never ceases to generate headaches: the election – supposedly random and heterogeneous – of the voting juries, none other than those in charge of carrying out the pre-counting of votes and recording the results. Although the Registry Office presented the process as a “success”, the truth is that there were problems behind it.
As organizations such as the Electoral Observation Mission (MOE) had been warning about from the simulations that are usually carried out in these procedures, the contracted software presented errors and in the end the final draw had to be done with a different system. Behind everything is the Disproel 2023 Temporary Union, in charge of providing the software and which was awarded a millionaire contract for more than $1 billion to assume the technological and computer services for the elections.
In this union, made up of a dozen companies, the one with the greatest participation is one that has been under the scrutiny of public opinion: the firm Thomas Greg & Sons, the same one sprinkled throughout the network that put in check the impression of visas and passports and that forced the Foreign Ministry to suspend another million-dollar process due to apparent irregularities in the bidding process.
“Today a different software than the one initially contracted is operating. When that happens, it is necessary to generate greater guarantees of transparency. It is natural that problems arise and that is what drills are for, but we need a report on what happened and what the errors were,” Camilo Mancera, coordinator of Electoral Justice of the MOE, explained to this newspaper, specifying that the new system It does not allow access to information to monitor the applicant entities or the jury lists.
In response, registrar Alexander Vega defended at the time that “the lists sent by political parties and movements were taken into account to guarantee the heterogeneity of jurors.”
Given the difficulties, the call made by the entities is that there be an oversight and review of the draw, and that the improvement plans be socialized for the formal elections: “Normally what is sought with the draw is to protect the randomness in the selection of juries and it is up to chance how the tables are formed. Also that it be heterogeneous so that there are not two or more people from one party at a table,” Mancera added.
The other alerts
In the midst of technological difficulties, today all eyes are on how the vote pre-counting software will operate, a determining factor in digitizing the votes and processing the information recorded by the voting juries. In a first operating simulation there were failures, although today the MOE recognizes that the Registry has worked to correct the difficulties.
However, where doubts persist is in the software for appointing electoral witnesses, to which are added failures to invite interested parties to participate. “In the simulations we have expressed concern because it has traditionally been a problem that days before the accreditation of witnesses is closed, the system is overloaded and the parties report that they were not able to have delegates,” Mancera said.
The magnifying glass is also on the software for the voting station delegates because, according to the Electoral Justice coordinator of the MOE, although one was hired in 2022 for $27,000 million, another was hired again in 2023. “There are “You doubt why a service was contracted twice and what happened so that last year’s service was not used.”
The Minister of the Interior himself, Luis Fernando Velasco, has also expressed his concern “about the failures that the political parties have had with the witness and jury software, the impossibility of carrying out the simulation.”
As if that were not enough, other organizations such as the Karisma Foundation – dedicated to monitoring technologies to advance social justice – drew attention to the limitations offered by the external audit hired for the elections, for which they warned that there would be no place to an in-depth, independent and technical review. “The contract with the company JAHV McGregor, the same contractor as in 2022, does not cover all the incorporated technologies, leaving without review those that were used for the registration of significant groups of citizens and those for national consolidation of scrutiny,” Karisma explained recently.
All these situations are still alarms that remain on even when there are two weeks left for the votes. Confidence in the process, minimizing risks and eliminating fraud threats will depend on how problems are resolved and guarantees are offered. Democracy is at stake.
Double contract?
In 2022, for a value of more than $27,000 million, the Registry Office contracted software to carry out scrutiny of both the legislative and parliamentary elections. The process, carried out with the firm Indra Colombia, stipulated payments for software maintenance until 2025, as revealed at the time by the newspaper El Espectador. However, the question is why another contract was made, now with the Disproel 2023 Temporary Union. The MOE and Karisma have asked for explanations on the matter; However, they point out that to date the reasons for that decision are unknown. Apparently, the functionalities of the two systems would be different.
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