Thursday, May 26, 2016

Electronic counting in Dominican Republic fails


Dominican Republican election authorities are desperately trying to come up with an official tally of votes after Spanish-based Indra Sistemas failed to provide reliable technology during the national elections held on May 15.

More than ten days have passed since polls closed, yet authorities are still figuring out what went wrong and how to process the votes of the Dominicans who participated. 

In September, 2015, Indra Sistemas was awarded by the Junta Central Electoral (JCE) a $31MM contract to provide two solutions, one to verify the identity of voters before casting a ballot and optical scanners to digitize the voter-marked ballots and streamline the counting and transmission of election data. However, things did not turn out as planned.

According to a preliminary report by the Organization of American States, “The biggest weakness on the day of the election had to do with the use of technical equipment. In many precincts, equipment failed, technical assistants did not show up, or there were problems related to connectivity or the operation of biometric machines or automated ballot counting machines...”

The report also states: “The implementation of these technological tools had serious problems: Lack of training of the technicians and their unfamiliarity with the way the equipment; Lack of human resources to run the equipment; and Flaws in security code recognition.”


The failure of Indra’s technology shouldn’t come as a surprise. Weeks before the election, political parties had expressed their discontent with the technology and how it was being implemented. To give assurance to political stakholders that no rigging would occur, authorities ordered a manual count of all votes cast to run in parallel with the electronic count. Post-election audits, which contrast electronic versus manual counting, are yielding different numbers. 

A local USAID-funded NGO named “Particpación Ciudadana” coincided with many of OAS’ comments. This NGO has a long trajectory of election observation in the Caribbean nation. Its third and last report on the election stated:

“In 30.7% of precincts problems in the scanning of ballots were reported, and in 30.9% of precincts with the transmission of the vote. Authorities relied on manual counting in 97.7% of the polling places. 

Anomalies in the counting of votes reached 62.4% of schools.

In 40.4% of schools anomalies occurred during the verification of voters and counting process. In 10% of the cases the printer did not work.

Voter registration devices did not arrive to 29.3% of polling centers. 

Vote counting machines were missing in 27.4% of schools; in those schools where the technology was delivered, there was plenty of confusion on how to properly handle it.”

With more details surfacing, the JCE will have a lot explaining to do in the coming weeks.