Global Courant 2023-05-19 16:00:50
The national prosecutors of the political parties reacted in clear opposition to the announcement by Irma Palencia, president of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), to acquire a new computer tool. Although there is no official price, she revealed that some Q8 million could be paid for it.
The function of this new system, whose acquisition is “in talks and in significant progress,” according to Palencia, is to speed up the final results of the elections and facilitate the adjudication of positions.
It is a completely different system from the Transmission of Preliminary Electoral Results (Trep). The function of this proposal is to digitize the minutes that make the results official by polling station, by municipality and department, together with the final documents that validate the awarding of positions, explained the electoral officials.
Negotiations are so advanced that yesterday the prosecutors were introduced to the service by Carlos Amador, from the firm that offers the service. Amador introduced himself as a businessman with extensive experience in electoral matters and is currently the president of Grupo Gyssa.
“It is a process after “D” day, it is not the Trep, this is a tool so that the boards can do their job quickly,” Amador explained to the prosecutors, who at one point questioned his presence in the room.
Some said that having a potential bidder at the meeting could be preferential treatment, so on more than one occasion prosecutors asked the representative of the Gyssa company to leave the room.
Currently, the final results can take days to become official, but with this service, according to the TSE, the response time would be less; however, exact data was not obtained on how agile it could become, it was only pointed out that it would be a matter of of hours.
unprotected votes
Most political parties rejected the system and argued that the Electoral and Political Parties Law (Lepp) is being violated, which states that the Departmental Electoral Boards (JED) and Municipal Electoral Boards (JEM) are the ones that safeguard the votes.
Implementing a computer system generated mistrust among prosecutors, because they consider that there is no valid and compelling reason to change the electoral rules just over a month before the voting.
The UNE prosecutor, César Romano, warned that incorporating a computer system at this point in the electoral process could represent a danger. “What is the purpose of the company having access to official documentation”, he questioned.
Elmer Palencia, Valor’s prosecutor, also questioned the TSE for trying to alter the procedure for final results and the adjudication of charges with a new system. “It completely depersonalizes the function that the JED and JEM have in the awarding of positions (…) we are no longer talking about a preliminary result or graphs, here we are already talking about a result and the awarding of a position,” he added.
Héctor Aldana, Vamos prosecutor, agreed, who showed distrust in the performance of the program: “how reliable are the algorithms and technical issues, I’d better go with the old reliable one, take out my calculator and record by record, the manual work that It’s always been done.”
Free of charge
Despite the fact that the president of the TSE, Irma Palencia, explained that they are in advanced conversations to make the purchase, the rest of the magistrates affirmed that they do not know the amount they would pay for the service.
Palencia, who was in charge of presenting the company and the system. he was not at the conference that was offered because of another meeting he had to attend, it was reported. The magistrates who did appear, Rafael Rojas and Gabriel Aguilera, said they did not know the amount and did not say they knew how many resources the TSE could have to make the purchase.
