The Organization of American States investigative committee has put the full blame of the collapse of the automated voting system on the IT technicians of the Central Electoral Board (JCE), the defective automated voting software and lack of adequate controls.
In its executive summary released on 14 April 2020, the OAS specialists attribute to “mismanagement” the failure of the electronic voting system. The report says they did not find evidence of sabotage or attempted fraud in the system used in the suspended 16 February 2020 municipal election. The executive summary states: “The poor design of the software, and the lack of commands to detect or prevent the failure and the not being able to mitigate the situation in time, also reflects the absence of protocols and the lack of application of good practices”.
The election was aborted after on the evening of 15 February political party representatives alerted that opposition party candidates were missing in the electronic voting ballot. The JCE attempted to fix the system at 5am on Election Day, but this was not possible due to the scope of the problem.
On 21 February, the JCE suspended its IT director, Miguel Angel García, to facilitate the investigation. A high-ranking committee of the Medina administration had traveled to Washington, D.C. to request that the OAS carry out an investigation into the reasons for the collapse of the automated voting system. Locally, the Attorney General Office had advanced an investigation into a colonel and Claro technician. This investigation would be canceled by the Presidency, and instead the government requested that the OAS send a team to investigate.
In first reactions, Jose Tomás Perez, Dominican ambassador to the USA, and a member of the ruling Dominican Liberation Party (PLD) political committee said that the final report shows that neither the government, nor the PLD, nor the opposition had anything to do with the failure of the automated voting system. “Technical failures, very much beyond the control of the parties, were the cause. Long live democracy,” he stated by Twitter.
Jose Ignacio Paliza, president of the Modern Revolutionary Party (PRM), said in a tweet that the countless IT errors, many of which are easily identified, justify his party’s strong insistence on changes in the JCE’s IT department. He added: “Dominicans will hardly be ever to forget the plot to accuse a police colonel, an IT technician and our candidate.”
After the e-voting glitch, the municipal election was suspended and rescheduled for 15 March 2020. The aborting of the system also led to the decision to go with printed ballots for the presidential and congressional election that had been set for 17 May and is now rescheduled for 5 July due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Read more in Spanish:
Diario Libre
Hoy
CDN
15 April 2020