Advanced technology is to be used to reduce fraud at the upcoming presidential elections according to a report released by Colombia’s National Registry Office on Thursday.
Registrar General, Carlos Ariel Sanchez, gave a statement in which he recognized that his role is to “give people confidence in the elections,” which he plans to do by using “technological advances” which will be “more effective than “just the law.”
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Such technological advances include the use of a Virtual Private Network (VPN) or cloud, which is a private network within a public network. This will allow data sharing in what is hoped to be a completely secure way.
| “It will be feasible to tell if irregularities are a computer glitch or the result of hacking.”-Registrar |
The use of this VPN will enable the presidential campaigns to “directly access information and have real-time results throughout the day,” according to Sanchez.
The results will be posted throughout the day on the Registrar’s website but will also be shared through the Google “Politics & Elections” portal. This is because the Google page is able to support “thousands of user queries simultaneously which prevents hacker attacks as information is disseminated through various sites.
Furthermore, in order to be as transparent as possible, the Registry Office will open up the source code, which is the programming behind the computer software to scrutiny.
“It will be feasible to tell if irregularities are a computer glitch or the result of hacking,” said Sanchez.
As with the congressional elections, bio-metric voter identification tools which stop multiple voting and voter impersonation will be installed at roughly 3,500 polling stations.
Lastly, each voting table collates the votes received on an E-14 form which will then be submitted online for the general public to compare with the official results on the Registry Office’s website. The scanning online of 85% of these result sheets on the day is being done to avoid clearly fraudulent vote counting which took place in the 2010 presidential elections.
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Although congressional elections on March 9 saw low levels of violence, there were many examples of fraud which the Registry Office is working hard to eliminate for these upcoming elections.
