Lagniappe
NYT`s Brian
Ellsworth:
Crucial vote for Venezuela and a
Company
Most Venezuelans see the coming referendum on
the rule of President Hugo Chávez as a chance to rebuild this
divided nation. But Antonio Mugica, chief executive of the
networking company Smartmatic, sees a phenomenal marketing
opportunity for his company's voting technology.
Smartmatic's voting machines will be used for
the first time in the Aug. 15 referendum that is likely to be one
of Venezuela's most hotly contested elections, making the
company's baptism by fire an all-or-nothing gamble that its first
electoral count will be flawless.
"If we can prove that this product works
under the most hostile of conditions, we can sell it anywhere in
the world," said Mr. Mugica, a 30-year-old Venezuelan electronic
engineer, in an interview in his downtown Caracas office. "That's
our marketing strategy."
The gamble is a big one. Smartmatic will have
to navigate the turbulent waters of Venezuela's political
struggle, which in just over two years has led to a coup d'état
that briefly removed Mr. Chávez from power and a two-month strike
that briefly almost shut down the crucial oil industry. Any
operational glitches leading to accusations of fraud or vote
manipulation would scar the company's reputation.
But if all goes well, Smartmatic could become
a rising star of the budding world of electronic voting, which in
this year's United States presidential elections will be used by
an estimated 30 percent of voters, compared with 9 percent in
2000, according to one election expert.
Smartmatic expects its sales to rise from
less than $10 million in 2003 to more than $100 million this year,
and it expects steady growth if the recall vote goes without a
hitch.
Mr. Mugica and his childhood friend Alfredo
Anzola opened Smartmatic in Boca Raton, Fla., in 1999, intent on
developing applications for the emerging field of device
networking, which allows electronic devices like cameras and alarm
systems to share information.
But after living through the Palm Beach
County ballot-counting uproar in the 2000 presidential elections,
the two decided that the best application of their networking
platform was as an electronic voting system.
This year, Smartmatic teamed with the
Venezuelan telephone company CANTV, which is 6.6 percent owned by
the government, and a Florida engineering company, Bizta, to form
a consortium called SBC. In February, the group won a $63 million
contract to sell 20,000 of its newly designed SAES 3000 election
machines and licenses for their software to Venezuelan authorities
for $63 million and a $27 million contract for service during the
recall vote.
But this booming business has not come easy.
Opposition leaders attacked the electoral authority's decision to
hire a company with no electoral experience for such a sensitive
vote, complaining that the selection process had not been open
enough. The credibility of Smartmatic took another hit in May when
The Miami Herald reported that the Venezuelan government owned a
28 percent stake in Smartmatic's partner company Bizta, leading
the opposition to suspect that the government would rig the
results. Bizta quickly bought out the government's
stake.
Smartmatic representatives said they never
expected the subject of impartiality to come up, indicating that
the company was as inexperienced in managing its public image as
it was in counting votes.
Critics of electronic voting also say that
Smartmatic is providing an overengineered solution to a situation
where a manual count would work just as well.
"The Venezuelan referendum has to be the
simplest election I've ever heard of - yes versus no," says Aviel
Rubin, an associate professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins
University who has researched electronic voting. "A paper ballot
vote with a manual vote count would be the most transparent way to
hold this election."
Mr. Mugica says the country's long history of
electoral fraud makes this impossible. But even opposition leaders
admit they are less wary of Smartmatic than of the National
Electoral Council, Venezuela's electoral authority, which is
dominated by a pro-Chávez directors. In March, the board, citing
technicalities, discarded hundreds of thousands of signatures
requesting the recall referendum. The action led to violent
protests that left 14 dead and dozens wounded.
Last Sunday, Smartmatic held test votes in
more than 4,000 locations around the country to prove the
reliability of its voting machines, which include encryption that
the company says will make fraud statistically impossible. The
company's touch-screen voting machines, roughly the size of a
desktop printer, are the first of their kind to print a paper
record that allows for a manual recount.
The test vote used the country's two rival
baseball teams as candidates, the Leones of Caracas and the nearby
Valencia Magallanes team. The results, however, were not released,
as Mr. Chávez is a known Magallanes fan, an indication of the
political eggshells the company is walking on.
Ezequiel Zamora, an opposition director on
the National Electoral Council, said of the technical performance,
"The equipment worked perfectly."
Mr. Mugica, who as a 9-year-old was already
programming simple video games on a 1983 Hewlett-Packard 86B
desktop computer, says he believes that electronic voting is an
improvement over manual-count elections. Nonetheless, he
acknowledges that his engineering background gives him an unusual
perspective on elections.
"Venezuelans are obsessed with the referendum
for its political implications," he said. "But for me, it's really
just a networking challenge."
By Brian Ellsworth in Caracas.
From the
July. 20, 2004 edition of the New York Times
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07/22/04
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