Weaknesses of the CNE’s electoral scheme

Last Monday and Tuesday, the National Electoral Council (CNE for its Spanish acronym) summoned technical and academic help, suppliers and representatives of political organizations to the Audit Technical Workshop of the technology platform for the general elections of 2013, and the computer expert Enrique Mafla, says the scheme designed by the agency for the electoral process, has some weaknesses.

Enrique Mafla (right) analyzed the weak spots of the CNE’s electoral process.

Mafla made an analysis of the scheme presented, which provides a summary of the risks:

A bloated registry

• The voter registry is inflated by at least 1.3 million voters. Furthermore, the electoral roll for each polling station contains 16 additional entries for the vote of police and military officers, which means 640,000 additional voters.

Redundant links

• There are three redundant links between each scrutiny board and the CNE. The redundant connection between the scrutiny board and the data center of the CNE did not work during the demonstration in the installed polling station.

A missing expert

• Colombian company LockNet is in charge of the security system. The website of this company (http://www.locknet.com.co/) only contains an image. This company, says Mafla, has hired former hacker Kevin Mitnick to perform safety checks to the Electoral Council system. Mitnick will arrive to the country on February 10.

The risk of manual counting in the polling stations

• Counting at polling stations, as provided for elections of February 17, is being performed manually, making it more susceptible to errors, as has happened in previous ballots.