Vote smart: Boca Raton's Smartmatic electronic voting machines powered Venezuela's contentious presidential referendum, but will they be accepted here in the US?

South Florida CEO,  Oct, 2004  by Van Hutchinson

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* When Venezuelan voters went to the polls Aug. 15, many of them were understandably nervous. The last time citizens there tried to oust President Hugo Chavez from power, 19 died in violent clashes between his supporters and the opposition.

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This time, the vote was out of the ordinary for several reasons, not the least of which was that it was the first time a presidential recall referendum had gone the distance in Latin America. Chavez won by a 59 percent margin in one of the most closely observed votes in recent history. It was also one of the most rapidly tallied national votes ever, due in large measure to the 20,000 electronic voting machines deployed by Boca Raton-based Smartmatic Corp.

This first widespread national test of Smartmatic's machines ended up being a referendum on whether electronic voting would eventually replace paper ballots--and whether those results would be secure and accurate--in many elections worldwide. Even if those questions were answered. Smartmatic still had a way to go to prove the worth of its systems.

"We designed the [voting system] with many layers of security, like an onion," says Smartmatic CEO Antonio Mugica. "If someone tried to tamper with a machine and changed just one byte, the machine would shut down."

The 30-year-old Venezuelan native has nine US patents pending, and he did research on robotics at Florida Atlantic University, in Boca Raton, after graduating from Simon Bolivar University in Venezuela. Mugica laid the groundwork for Smartmatic in 1997 when he began to realize the possibilities of device networking--an emerging field that allows mass-scale, instantaneous connection of devices from stoplights to security cameras and sensors, "Everything will be connected," Mugica says.

Mugica was in Palm Beach County during the 2000 presidential election with its infamous hanging chads. He and his partners started looking for ways to apply device networking to electronic voting, a topic that is even more relevant this election year. For Smartmatic, the first test of its voting systems was in Venezuela. "Venezuela is to the world what Florida is to the [United] States," says Mugica.

"With all the paranoia in Venezuela, we set out to make the most secure methodologies possible," Mugica adds. "The source code was verified by independent engineers. It is virtually impossible, with the layers of electronic security and a hardcopy of every vote cast, for the results to be falsified. We couldn't alter them if we tried."

Critics such as Avi Rubin, director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, says, "In a referendum where the vote is simply 'yes' or 'no,' using an electronic voting system is overkill." Electronic voting expert Rebecca Mercuri commended Smartmatic's ability to print hardcopy ballots, but criticized the Venezuelan election committee for only taking random samples of the actual ballots rather than a complete manual audit. She says the Venezuela experience "shows you can do it; now you need to go the rest of the way."

Right now, the company has 80 full-time employees in Venezuela preparing for regional elections. At the time of the referendum, as many as 12,000 were employed for one month as election workers and supervisors. Smartmatic formed a consortium with Venezuela's main telecommunications provider, CANTV, and a small company called Bizta that digitized manual votes from outlying areas. Smartmatic also has 20 office employees in Boca Raton, Sunnyvale, California, and Mexico City.

The company is currently deploying device-networking technology in Latin America at 500 branches of the Santander Bank, one of the world's largest financial institutions. Smartmatic's "Unified Security Platform" ties together physical security devices and surveillance equipment across a secure network.

Smartmatic's $63 million slice of the Venezuelan consortium's $91 million contract is a big step toward Mugica's goal of $100 million in sales this year. And he says an additional $24 million to pay for regional elections later this month will extend his company's contract with the Venezuelan government.

In the US, Smartmatic is pursuing a share of the $3.9 billion Congress has appropriated to help states make the transition to electronic voting. The firm hired former Unisys executives Jack Blaine and Robert Cook to lobby Washington on behalf of the company.

While electronic voting systems are its most high-profile product, Mugica does not want Smartmatic to be typecast. Electronic voting technology is "only 2 percent of what we do, from a technology point of view--98 percent, our core, is device networking technology." Smartmatic's technologies will power both wired and wireless devices in hospitals, homes, banks, and fleets of vehicles. Mugica expects US homeland security needs, as well as worldwide terrorism concerns, to drive unprecedented demand for security applications of device networking.