DRC: Independent Electoral Commission to Audit Voting Machines

In the DRC, after the reluctance of both the Catholic Church, members of the opposition and Congolese civil society to use the “voting machine” for the December 23, 2018 election, the Independent National Electoral Commission(CENI) has decided to have the subject of all debates audited.

A call for tenders for an assessment of the proper functioning of this computer, which is to be used to print the ballots on election day, is being prepared.

In February 2018 the Congolese Episcopal Conference recommended to the Electoral Commission to have the voting machines certified by national and international experts. With the aim of dispersing the suspicions that its use has aroused in the Congolese population and to prevent the elections from being contested in advance.

The CENI has therefore decided to have the machine audited, in order to remove any ambiguity.

Corneille Nangaa, the president of the Electoral Commission, knows that “people call the machine to vote””machine to cheat””. So, the audit will consist of saying if it cheats or if it does not cheat. If it’s reliable or not.

Reliability, risk of failure, all the technical elements of this computer to vote should therefore be examined.

The terms of reference for this audit are currently under development, so no expert has yet been identified to conduct this review. There is also a question that this audit may not be able to answer: the time that each elector will need to vote with this machine

With a high proportion of Congolese who can not read or write, many people are afraid of a traffic jam on election day, because of the use of a computer to vote.