Smartmatic, the owner of the elections | The company sees …

The company Smartmatic has won the call for tenders launched by Correo Argentino and will be responsible for the preliminary examination of the primaries of the month of August, the general elections of October and the beginning of October. 39, a possible presidential run-off in November this year. With a better economic offer, Smartmatic has replaced Indra, a Spanish woman who has been doing this job for 22 years and who has made "very serious technical observations" to her competitors and who could open the tender. Smartmatic, of Venezuelan origin and headquartered in London, also won the call for tenders for the digitization and transmission of the data in question from the tally sheets. The PJ defined the dispute as "a commercial fight" and asked the Interior Ministry to suspect the technical ability of Smartmatic to transmit data from all polling stations, for which it would use "15,000 netbooks provided by Educ.ar under an ad hoc agreement "with the national government.

With an economic offer of 17 million dollars to develop the provisional control of the entire process of the presidential election, Smartmatic replaced the Catalan Scytl which cost 17.9 million dollars and the Spanish Indra 19.2 million. dollars.

Although Indra could continue the bidding process. The Spanish multinational had unsuccessfully opposed the technical shortcomings of its competitors, which included contested experiences they had developed in other countries, before the opening of the economic offer package.

"Tenderers would not comply with the minimum technical requirements to participate in the selection procedure and, therefore, would not offer conditions that would sufficiently ensure the effective performance of the services to be processed," Indra said in a presentation. 16 pages sent to La Poste. Argentina, in charge of the call for tenders. As a result, the company has not yet lost the activities it has been developing in Argentina since 1997. If Indra's claims did not succeed, Smartmatic would retain the entire process of interim control over the transmission of data, which has also been selected by an offer. $ 1,360,000 for the software that will be used for this feature. The company has arrived at the crossroads of questions. "We won the call for bids with an economic offer ten percent lower than Indra and we exceeded the technical requirements," said Andrés Rombolá, managing director of Cono Sur at Smartmatic, which also defended the technical capabilities of the company. Among other international experiences, the tender he won in Los Angeles, USA, for the conduct of the elections "in competition with 30 US companies and Canada", "whose electronic system has pbaded the controls established by the FBI and the CIA ".

"It's a business fight," said PJ national lawyer Jorge Landau before the PáginaI12 consultation. In any case, he insisted on the most disputed aspect of the change of electoral system introduced by the government: the electronic transmission of the results. The national PJ asked information from the secretary of political affairs of the Ministry of the Interior, Adrián Pérez, to know the details of the system. Among these, if "the 15,000 netbooks and 15,000 scanners that would be used to capture and transmit the results of each table will be provided by Educ.ar under an ad hoc agreement, they will be identical to those that have been distributed to high school students, its technical capacity and its maintenance status ". For what is requested "detailed technical information on all equipment to be used and the transmission software outsourced, closed and without the intervention of any university or official institution badyzing the open source and dictating the convenience and the reliability of its use ". In addition to "conducting a pilot test of the entire system from a school, including the use of software."