Global Courant
In the last meeting of national prosecutors of political parties with TSE authorities, the majority of groups requested that the million-dollar contract for the counting of votes of the two electoral boards that operate in the department of Guatemala be annulled.
Judge Blanca Alfaro pointed out that they also talked with other authorities from political parties to reach a consensus. “We also had a meeting with general secretaries of political parties and they did not express any distrust,” Alfaro said.
But the prosecutors who criticized the system a day before continued with the same position, they see it as unnecessary to have a system that repeats the function of Datasys, which cost Q148 million.
Héctor Aldana, Vamos prosecutor, pointed out that his general secretary attended the meeting but that the issue of the alternate computer system was not on the agenda, and that at the time of leaving the meeting the issue had not been addressed.
For Elmer Palencia, prosecutor of Valor, these types of issues, because they are eminently technical, are the responsibility of prosecutors, since the function of the secretaries is another, and he reaffirmed the same position against the system.
“It is not true, we are against the use of an alternative system,” said César Romano, a prosecutor for the National Hope Unit (UNE), who sees the insistence on continuing with a contract that arouses so many doubts as suspicious, “such maybe it is some kind of business, because the TSE is going to give the preliminary results”.
Also Diego Blanco, prosecutor of Voluntad Oportunidad y Solidaridad (VOS) said that “the meeting was not as they say”, adding that the subject “was not touched on”.
Answer pending
The TSE plenary session has not yet decided whether it will accept the request of the political parties, which was to order the two boards to suspend the computer contract and limit themselves to using only the system provided by the Court.
“As a plenary session of magistrates, we also agreed to make an analysis regarding the requirement that was raised, also by the spokesperson for the prosecutors,” explained Judge Rafael Rojas.
The next meeting between electoral authorities and national prosecutors of the political parties will be next Tuesday, where some prosecutors hope to have a response from the electoral authorities.
The doubts of the political parties continue about the purchase of a computer system in the Departmental Electoral Board (JED) of Guatemala and the Central District, which have their own system for counting votes.
This Friday, June 16, the JED of Guatemala developed a demonstration before electoral observers and the media, of the operation of the computer system that they classify as a “technological tool.”
During the exercise, at the request of the attendees, erroneous data was entered into the system, which alerted that the typing did not correspond to the data in the record that had previously been scanned.
But in the first part of the exercise, the keyboard presented some connectivity problems with the tablet, other than that the devices continued to operate normally.
“All the use of technology is to support us in the result, so that they are exact, this process is pertinent, it is necessary,” said Julio Salazar, secretary of the JED of Guatemala.
The member of the temporary electoral body stressed that they can work without this computer system, but they cannot estimate the time it would take them to count the votes: “nobody could know, because it is an atypical situation,” he said.
This electoral board estimates to carry out a drill on June 23, two days before the voting, while the Central District will carry out the test of its own system next Monday.
José Murua, president of the Electoral Board of the Central District, stated that the tool develops a count, since the projection and transmission of the preliminary results will be in the hands of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal.
“It is not the final vote, but that each one of the receiving boards has to give and each one of the volunteers that is at their table is responsible for counting and filling out the record four,” explained the president.
He also indicates that they can work without this tool, which between the two electoral boards will be paid for Q7.6 million, but he does not dare to say how long it would take them to finish the job.
“Programs did not exist years ago, they are not preprinted records that I am going to scan that will have an accuracy of 99 percent, in the end you need a mechanism in which these records will have to be accounted for and be able to keep a record, we are talking about more than 200 thousand records,” he explained.
