Paraguay
The TSJE denied failures in the voting machines and attributed the episode to a procedural error
Paraguay’s Electoral Justice responded to Senator Éver Villalba’s complaints and said the documents shown were not tally sheets. According to its explanation, the zero result was caused by an omission by polling station members during a party primary.
The Superior Tribunal of Electoral Justice rejected complaints by Liberal Senator Éver Villalba over alleged technical failures in the voting machines and defended the reliability of the system, according to Unicanal.
During a press conference, authorities from the body said the documents shown by the lawmaker do not correspond to official tally sheets, but rather to certificates from the Preliminary Election Results Transmission system, known as TREP.
According to Unicanal, the director of Electoral Processes, Carlos María Ljubetic, said the complaint is based on a false interpretation by presenting as a machine malfunction what was in fact a TREP result. He also stressed that the mandatory use of this mechanism was established by law and required by Parliament itself.
According to the TSJE explanation, the episode occurred because of a lack of training among polling station members appointed by internal movements, who went directly to tally mode without first reading the chip on the ballots. Under those conditions, the machine returned a zero count because no vote had been registered.
The body said that certificate with a zero result corresponded to the party primary elections of June 7 and not to a failure of the equipment. Still according to the official version cited by Unicanal, the error was noticed by the polling stations themselves, which restarted the procedure and then processed the ballots correctly.
For the TSJE, the case shows that the machines do not store votes internally and that the record depends on reading the physical ballots.
Sources
About this note. Written by El Notero with assistance from artificial intelligence, based on what was published by the cited outlet. El Notero did not do its own reporting on this fact.
