CARACAS, Venezuela--(BUSINESS WIRE)--“Electing 2,790 posts from 16,088 candidates and then announcing official results within a few hours. These are feats only seen in countries that employ electoral automation,” stated Antonio Mugica, CEO of Smartmatic, the company responsible for designing and deploying the technological voting platform used in Venezuela’s recent municipal elections.
On Sunday, 8 December, Smartmatic deployed over 39,427 voting machines to record the will of the people: some 58,054,847 votes cast in around ten hours. This electoral contest marks the thirteenth time Venezuela has successfully run a national election using the company’s technology and project management services.
"We are proud to have served Venezuela again. It has been almost a decade now since we began developing the most advanced automated voting platform in the world, in partnership with the electoral authorities and political parties," said Mugica.
Smartmatic’s voting hardware fully automated every electoral process, from ballot definition to voting, tallying and result publication. The elections company also provided software that offered real-time monitoring, as well as managed services to help run every electoral process. No other company in the world offers this kind of fully integrated, end-to-end election solution.
In the weeks running up to Venezuela’s municipal elections, the political parties involved audited the electronic voting platform no less than 13 times. In Smartmatic's system, voters themselves act as auditors when their machine prints a paper receipt. At the end of the event, nearly 53% of the polls were audited, helping everyone accept the legitimacy of the results.
Watch a video explaining the Venezuelan voting process.
Key facts about the elections
- Voters choose from 16,088 candidates for 2,792 municipal posts.
- From the 19,066,431 voters eligible to participate in this election, 58.92% headed to the polls on Sunday.
- 39,427 Smartmatic voting machines were deployed in 13,651 voting centers.
- Smartmatic managed a team of 77,986 workers performing tasks such as system configuration and priming, tech support, tallying and more.
- The results of 77% of the municipalities in dispute were announced only a couple of hours after the polls closed and 100% of results were published on the official website minutes after announcing it.
About Smartmatic
By helping governments become more transparent and more efficient, our technology benefits societies around the world. Our automated elections make it easier for nations to let people decide their leaders securely. With over 2.2 billion ballots cast and counted, no other company has more experience helping democracies vote easily, securely and accurately. So far we’ve run verifiable and auditable elections in the United States, Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean – and there’s more to come.
We employ over 600 professionals in the US, UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Mexico, Barbados, Brazil, Panama, Venezuela, Philippines, India and Taiwan.