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What TREP Is and Why It Does Not Determine the Official Result in Paraguay
The Preliminary Electoral Results Transmission system is used to publish trends during election night. According to ABC Color, its function is informational and it does not replace the legal count by the Electoral Justice.
The system known as TREP, the acronym for Preliminary Electoral Results Transmission, was introduced in Paraguay to speed up the dissemination of election data and reduce uncertainty during election day. According to ABC Color, its first use was in the vice presidential election of August 2000 and later in the 2001 municipal elections.
According to that outlet, the mechanism became established in the 2003 general elections, moved to a digital format in 2013 and was later adapted to the voting machine system used since the 2021 municipal elections. The Superior Court of Electoral Justice says it is a reference system in the region, although it has also faced political criticism in different elections.
ABC Color notes that TREP serves to quickly publish trends, but it has no legal validity to determine winners. The official proclamation comes later, based on the final count and the review of the records, a task that falls to the Electoral Justice.
The procedure begins at each polling station. There, polling station members sign the result certificates generated by the voting machine and hand them over to the personnel in charge of collecting and forwarding that documentation. Then, those certificates are verified and transmitted to the corresponding center for processing and publication.
Still according to ABC Color, the TSJE has 1,187 polling places, 2,064 collectors and 1,196 CTX/TREP system operators to receive, process and publish the information.
The outlet also recalls that the official result is not based on that preliminary transmission, but on the review of the physical records and other electoral instruments by the electoral courts of each department or area of the country and by the TSJE itself.
In that context, ABC Color also reviewed some definitions of the electoral process. A valid vote is one that unequivocally expresses the voter’s will in favor of an enabled candidacy or list. A blank vote means not choosing any option and is part of the total number of voters, but it does not count for any candidate. A null vote, by contrast, is an invalid ballot for failing to meet the formal requirements set out in the regulations. There are also so-called votes to be counted, which are those subject to review because of doubts or inconsistencies in the records.
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.
