Caracas Chronicles

One of the key points of the situation with the Venezuelan elections has been the discussion over vote tallies, or actas. The CNE (National Electoral Council, the election board) very purposely has avoided making them available, even when the international community has been pressuring them to do so and when the mandatory 48 hours to publish them have expired. The CNE’s website—which should publish the results by polling station, center, municipality and state—remains down. Meanwhile, candidate Edmundo González and opposition leader Maria Corina Machado uploaded the voting tallies gathered by the election witnesses and made them available online—showing González Urrutia’s landslide win over Maduro.

In response to the CNE’s continued silence on the matter, accusations have emerged that the Venezuelan government is fabricating counterfeit vote tallies (actas), which they will present as evidence of their victory. Former vice president of Colombia Francisco Santos said that Chinese engineers that came from Cuba were working with CNE employees in a warehouse solely dedicated to counterfeiting vote tallies. 

We thought it’d be useful to explain how and why counterfeiting vote tallies would be next to impossible, or at least very easy to spot.

How do vote tallies work?

For years now, Venezuelans have been voting with machines. For this election, voters first presented their cédula (national ID card), the number of which was introduced by the voting table personnel into a captahuella (a biometric ID verifying machine), then scanning their fingerprint for identity verification. They then went into the voting booth and selected their candidate on a screen. Once confirmed, the machine both recorded the vote and printed a papeleta, a paper confirmation of the selected vote. 

Once voting ended and the table was closed, the voting machine transmits the vote count electronically and prints the vote tally (acta). The vote tally is a paper printout containing all relevant voting data for the day, and serves as physical evidence of the results.

How can you tell an acta is real?

Vote tallies have a 32-digit alphanumeric code at the top. That code is what’s known as a “hash”. A hash is a function that converts an input of letters and numbers into an encrypted output of a fixed length. In other words, a hash takes any information and encrypts it into a code which has a set number of digits. It’s like a fingerprint for a document. In the case of our vote tallies, each acta is encrypted into a 32-digit, alphanumeric hash. 

Actas were also physically signed by election witnesses. Lastly, they have a “digital signature”, a code different from the Hash, at the bottom.

How could you fake a vote tally?

I can think of two different ways you’d fake a vote tally (acta), in different levels of sophistication.

The first one is to try to get the machine to print new vote tallies. This, says election journalist Eugenio Martínez, isn’t viable because it’d require a shared key: of which one part is in the hands of CNE and the rest of which is in the hands of each political party. No shared key, no access to the machines.

The second one is to counterfeit the vote tallies: print out new, entirely fake ones. This is physically possible, but it presents a number of challenges.

First, the sheer effort of producing one new acta per voting station, 30,026 in total, and get them to look identical to the original, would be massive. They’d have to match QR code by QR code, Hash by Hash, and forge tens of thousands of witness signatures to look identical. But suppose they manage to overcome that particular hurdle.

Comparing the forged tallies with the real ones and verifying results would be easy, as election journalist Eugenio Martínez explained in this thread. According to Martínez, you can verify the authenticity of the hash. You can compare the tally with the data on the voting notebooks and the citizen verification tallies, and make sure all three match. You can use the QR code to verify information. You can then verify the witnesses’s identities and see whether they saved pictures of their actas. Thousands of them are already on social media for anyone to see.

In short, even in the case of a blatant forgery, there are robust fact-checking methods.

What does this mean?

On the night of Sunday, July 28th, the National Electoral Council (CNE) stopped the electronic transmission of vote counts at around 30% and CNE president Elvis Amoroso announced Nicolás Maduro as President Re-Elect with 51.2% of the votes against Edmundo González’s 44.2%. He claimed 80% of the votes had been transmitted, but did not present evidence or a detailed vote count. Shortly after, Edmundo González and María Corina Machado denied Amoroso’s results, claiming they had around 40% of the vote tallies, and they showed a large advantage of González over Maduro. Amoroso proclaimed Maduro as president the day after in an official act which is usually held after tallies have been checked and irregularities have been resolved. González and Machado, on the other hand, have continued to collect vote tallies and publish their results, most recently publishing 81,21% of the vote tallies in an openly verifiable website, and which shows a Gonzáles victory with 67% of the tallied votes.

It’s hard to predict whether Chavismo will, in fact, resort to counterfeited vote tallies. But everyone should know why and how you can tell the difference.