Venezuelan recounts Smartmatic machine votes, Will the U.S. be next?

Many Venezuelan-Americans are praying hard this week in hopes that a recount of votes can either remove Nicolas Maduro from power, or minimally allow for a new election. The Venezuelan National Electoral Board (CNE) promises to make a partial audit of the April 14 election that allegedly gave Maduro a marginal victory.

The Venezuelan President of CNE, Tibisay Lucena has not promised to count all the ballots, if anything he says it's impossible to approve the type of request that Henrique Capriles has asked for, and he considers it beyond his jurisdiction legally to do so. Part of the voting system used was Smartmatic, the same electronic voting system used in the U.S. America should keep a close eye on the difficulties Venezuela is facing in validating their votes, because we may see ourselves dealing with similar issues. Henrique Capriles, and his supporters feel that the Venezuelan election was either manipulated or faulty. He has asked for a recount of all the votes, promising to take the issue to the Venezuelan Supreme Court where he plans to demand a new election.

The electronic voting system Smartmatic, has a thumbprint reader, but scrambles the order of votes, so there's no way of knowing where the votes came from. Smartmatic is having more than one security issue. Smartmatic was used in Manila, Philippines in 2010, and the votes were reported from districts that didn't even exist. The fact that the United States uses the same voting system should given many alarm. Earlier this year, the United States Commission of Elections, better known as Comelec, decided to use the machines for upcoming elections regardless of all the glitches. Do we really want to have another "disputed" election? Although Comelec has decided not to use the thumb mark, it will continue to still use the company's faulty CF compact flash (CF) hard system, which has been known to have problematic issues.

In 2012, when used here in the U.S., Smartmatic had to replace 76,000 of them because they were not configured properly. Why is Comelac so tied to Smartmatic? Well there is one company that wants to know, LDLA Marketing, a company who lost their bid for the CF cards, filed a petition against Comelec and filed it with the U.S. Supreme court. The company leaders feel that Comelec has played favorites to Smartmatic in the public bidding for the compact flash CFs. As far as Venezuela is concerned, the critics doubt there will be any changes in leadership as a result of the voting recount, but at least it exposes frailties in the Smartmatic system that Comelec should review, or the U.S. will pay for the consequences. Our nation is divided as it is, any disputed major election would only separate the country more.