On Sunday, August 11, the Open, Simultaneous and Mandatory Primaries (PASO) will take place throughout Argentina, in which for the first time – after the vote count – The telegrams will be transmitted from each voting center via a scanner over the cellular telephone network. 70% of the 15.000 voting centres are covered by the network.
The new transmission system aims to speed up the provisional count. In voting centers without a cellular network, the telegrams will be transported as before by the Argentine Post Office to the Digitalized Electoral Branches - previously called Data Transfer Centers.
When the vote leaves the voting center, two processes take place
1. The provisional count is made from the telegramsIt has no legal validity, but produces a provisional result a few hours after the end of voting. This result may change during the final count, which includes all the tables and the resolutions on observed votes and contested voters. It is the responsibility of the National Electoral Directorate, which is dependent on the Ministry of the Interior, and is carried out centrally.
2. The final count is carried out based on the minutes. It is the instance that has legal value to define who are the elected candidates for each of the positions at stake. It is carried out by the National Electoral Justice. in a decentralized manner, since it is the responsibility of the federal judges in the PASO and of the electoral boards in the general elections and the runoff. It includes the resolution of observations and challenges and the votes of citizens residing abroad, those deprived of liberty and security forces assigned to the electoral command that are not covered by the provisional.
The two processes begin at the voting table but then branch off. Once voting is over, the president of each table opens the ballot box, takes out the envelopes, opens them and verifies their contents, takes out the ballots with the votes, grades and counts each vote in the presence of the party inspectors. He then dumps the results of this count into the minutes of scrutiny and transcribes them into two types of documents: the telegram and certificates of scrutiny for the prosecutors. Then, the president of the table hands the ballot box, the envelope with the minutes, and the telegram to an employee of the Argentine Post Office.
The Argentine Post Office collects and transmits the telegrams from the voting center or transports, digitizes and transmits them from the now called digital electoral branches -formerly a data transmission center-. In addition, a company, which this year will be smartmatic, loads, sums and disseminates telegram data.
The delay in transporting telegrams from the voting centers to the Post Office centers - where the telegrams were digitized and transmitted - is one of the factors that delayed past provisional counts. A study by CIPPEC shows that the number of competing lists and the educational level of each area also partly explain this delay.
The provisional scrutiny serves an informative purpose, only the final scrutiny has legal value..
“It is unusual to talk about the final count because generally Provisional data show irreversible trends, But the elected candidates are proclaimed based on the result of the final count, carried out by the National Electoral Justice of each district," he explains. Maria Page, associate researcher of the Political Institutions program at CIPPEC.
The final counting of votes begins 48 hours after the end of voting. Unlike the provisional count, which never covers all the tables, the final count is carried out at all the tables and is done with the counting minutes that each table president prepared on election day.
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