The clock marked 11:11 a.m. on Sunday, February 16, 2020, and as if it were an unfulfilled wish, the then chairman of the Central Electoral Council (JCE), Julio César Castaños Guzmán, announced the suspension on national television and in front of thousands of spectators. of the regular municipal elections that have been going on for more than four hours.
Those elections would for the first time use the automated voting system, which would be used in the 18 municipalities that concentrated the largest number of voters and it was precisely a failure in those teams that caused it to be suspended for the first time in Dominican history in an election tournament, and that shocked democracy.
According to Castaños Guzmán’s statements, the suspension was due to the teams having problems with the full electronic loading of the ballot, and even with the loading of the list of participants. Those failures had been present since the night of February 15th.
Immediately, allegations of sabotage and fraud between the ruling party and the opposition did not wait, while the citizen demanded an explanation from the electoral body as to what had happened, through mass protests in the Plaza de la Bandera, just in front of the headquarters of the JCE.
The first of the protests took place the following evening, and the crowd grew bigger and louder as the weeks went by, adding casseroles. Two days after the failed municipal elections, police confirmed the arrest of two people for their alleged connection to the problems in the automated voting equipment, which exacerbated the crisis.
“If something doesn’t go well, you have to be quiet and apologize. When somebody fails, he has to acknowledge it and ask for forgiveness and that’s what it is, there was a failure. It’s not to defend myself, but what I was informed about was that the ballot loading problem was a simple thing and could be easily resolved. Well, we realized it wasn’t, ” said Castaños Guzmán, who insisted he would not resign despite popular demands.
Police director Ney Aldrin Bautista reported that Colonel Ramón Antonio Guzmán Peralta was under investigation a month and a half before the election assigned to the security members of PRM presidential candidate Luis Abinader. Likewise, the Claro telephone company technician, Manuel Antonio Regalado, had been arrested for allegedly knowing “about a possible plot of what had happened.
The OAS investigation
On February 21, the Dominican government ordered the Organization of American States (OAS) to investigate the malfunction in the automated voting system and effectively suspend the prosecution’s investigation. The following week, the JCE and the OAS would sign the basis of the agreement opening the audit of the international organization.
The scrutiny, according to what was said at the press conference that day, consisted of randomly taking 80 teams from the automated voting of the suspended elections.
Of those 80 teams, 20 would be chosen that never caused problems, 20 that malfunctioned and were never repaired, 20 that failed but eventually worked, and 20 that belonged to the backup portion.
The Secretary General of the OAS, Luis Almagro, indicated at the time that the main mission of this technical audit is to identify the causes that caused the failure of the equipment used in 18 divisions. In the 45-page report, released by the OAS on the night of April 14 of that year, the entity determined that the malfunctions in the system were caused by errors made by the engineers of the JCE IT department. And not by external attacks on the software.
CHRONOLOGY
February 19
The situation led to the cancellation of the entity’s then IT director, Miguel Ángel García, who had been suspended since February 19 and replaced by Johnny Rivera before the July 5 presidential election.
Mar. 15
What the polls said was going to be an electoral tournament resulted in crushing victories on the part of the entire opposition in the March 15 elections led by the PRM that won the most mayors, including all of Greater Santo Domingo, except for Santo.