Paraguay
Villalba called for an audit of voting machines after reporting tally sheets with zero votes
Liberal Senator Éver Villalba said he detected inconsistencies in tally sheets from polling stations where, according to election records, voting did take place. He called for a technical review of the equipment that will be used in the municipal elections on October 4.
Liberal Senator Éver Villalba said, according to ABC Color, that he has tally sheets from the recent internal elections of the Partido Liberal Radical Auténtico and the Asociación Nacional Republicana in which polling stations appear with zero votes, despite election records showing that voting took place there.
According to the lawmaker, that documentation must be subjected to a technical review to determine whether there was a failure in the voting machines and, if so, establish what impact it may have had on the results. Villalba said that for now he is speaking of a failure and not fraud, and conditioned any more serious conclusion on an audit.
Still according to ABC Color, the senator submitted on the floor of the Senate a draft resolution requesting that the Tribunal Superior de Justicia Electoral provide two voting machines so they can be technically audited. The proposal was made during a session that later lost quorum amid debate on the initiative.
Villalba also said he was not called to take part in the audits carried out by the TSJE and said the technicians he proposed were rejected, which is why he questioned the effective participation of his sector in those reviews.
The criticism comes after the checks carried out this year by the Electoral Justice. As ABC Color recalled, the TSJE began a hardware and software audit of the machines on February 2 with the participation of technical representatives from political organizations, and also carried out another review at the request of the ANR ahead of its internal elections.
Even so, Villalba maintained that those processes do not dispel the doubts he raises based on the tally sheets he presented and called for a new review of specific pieces of equipment. He also said that even a single technical problem is enough to put under review the reliability of the voting system planned for the municipal elections on October 4.
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 conduct its own reporting on this fact.
