Smartmatic will examine the presidential elections: how much will it cost?

The aspirations of Correo Argentino to reduce its deficit to zero in 2019 put an end to the artificial monopoly created around the company which provided the provisional counting service. After 22 years of direct responsibility in the task, Spanish Indra will not lead this process to this year's elections after a call for bids dedicated to Smartmatic, a company born in the United States and currently based in the United Kingdom.

Of the four companies that participated in the call for tenders launched in the first days of January, three met the technical and basic requirements according to a score evaluation. Indra, Smartmatic and SCYTL (Spanish) formed the finalist trio, while the consortium composed of Thomas Greg & Sons Limited, Thomas Processing & Systems and Gestión Técnico de Información SA did not pbad the first step.

The second case involved opening the envelopes containing the economic proposal made last Friday at the post offices of the Barracas district in Buenos Aires. Smartmatic presented the best offer, u $ s 17,093,888followed by SCYTL u $ s 17,899,042, And Indra $ 19,235,000. When there was a difference of less than 10% between the first and the second, the schedule provided for the possibility of reformulating the proposal. "Anything to reduce costs, welcome," they argued by mail.

This afternoon, the final proposals were presented: Smartmatic improved the figure and proposed to make provisional counting of OSP votes, total and final balance for $ 16,899,920; SCTYL maintained the original proposal.

A 5 business day delay is now open to allow the losing business to meet the challenges it is preparing to win the call for bids. Then only the phonebook Correo Argentino officially approves Smartmatic. The question would be defined on Friday of next week.

The winner will be responsible for the processing of the telegrams prepared by the authorities of the board of directors and will deliver, not before 22 hours, a provisional count of the votes. For the first time, Correo Argentino will digitize them and transmit them – before the trucks approached the post office where they had just been digitized – at two treatment centers in Barracas and Montegrande. For this new task, the software had to be acquired via a tender that was also the winner of Smartmatic.

Indra and a 22-year history

Since 1997, the Spanish company has been dealing by direct contract with the telegrams produced by the provisional recount. In 2015, during previous presidential elections, he was paid for this service. US $ 33,000,000.

Four years later, in accordance with the intentions of the deficit of Casa Rosada 0, Correo Argentino, historically designated for this task by the Ministry of the Interior, has launched a tender for the best price. The alarms went off at the company's offices in Puerto Madero.

Indra responded to the call for tenders and obtained the highest score during the technical evaluation and basic evaluation. In 2017, he boasted that his accounts had a difference of less than 1% compared to the final difference made by the electoral justice. It's the economic offer that left it out of the game: having a difference greater than 10% with Smartmatic's proposal, it no longer has the ability to rephrase it.

Until the last moment, he sought by all means to remove his competitors from the field. He raised objections during the period set for this purpose and attempted through legal notices to suspend the opening of the envelopes and the economic evaluation in order to carry out a "reasoned weighting of the 39, order of merit ". "In this way, they argued, it aims to prevent damage to the public interest from possible attribution to companies that do not have the guarantees and minimum conditions necessary to advance the process".