The use of advanced - and very costly - technological means do not guarantee honest elections or accurate counts in itself. This will obviously depend on other factors: the intentions of those who run the process, their control over its progress and some possibilities of control and appeal on behalf of the opposition and neutral observers, should there be any. But technology does not even guarantee greater effectiveness in the execution of material tasks. On the contrary, the employment of means that are too advanced in relation to the training of the users or the standards of the rest of the systems used, may produce more malfunctions than advantages.
In her article on the use of high technology elements in the elections held in Equatorial Guinea, Pamela Reeves sets out an example regarding the utility of the said means to improve the progress of the electoral process, or even to help it run smoothly.
In the local elections in September 1995, the opposition had reported a massive fraud case in the governmental count, which took ten days before making the results known and victory was proclaimed for the governmental candidates, whilst the opposition had its own unofficial count.
As a token of its effort of transparency and fairness in the next elections, the Government spent 750,000 Dollars on the acquisition of fax equipment with a satellite connection, handled by technical experts, from a reputed British company, for the head offices of each of the eighteen electoral districts. The mission of these experts was to transmit the official voting records to Malabo, with the results of each voting station. As an additional guarantee, the presidents of the voting stations had to take the original voting records and other documentation for final verification of the results. In Malabo there were five fax machines to receive the results and a photocopier to make two copies of each record received: one for the Electoral Management Body and the other for the international observers.
In theory, the results of the districts should have been sent by fax and the satellite connection to a communications centre based in Canada. From there they were to be remitted to a public telephone centre in the continental territory of Guinea; from there they would be sent via a microwave system situated on the island of Bioko to Malabo and finally, they would reach the five portable fax machines at the headquarters by means of a local telephone network.
However, on the day of the elections, the Canadian telephone system had a failure that lowered the chances of receiving calls to thirty per cent, slowing down the process considerably. To lighten the information burden on the five fax machines, it was decided that, where possible, the voting records should be hand delivered to the headquarters from the voting stations. Ballot boxes were lost and the publication of the results was delayed by five days. By the time the fax machines were withdrawn, on the fifth day, around seventy five per cent of the votes had been scrutinised. The Electoral Management Body decided to suspend the publication of provisional results until receiving particulars from those districts where the failure of the faxes had occurred. The final results of the voting were not made known until fifteen days afterwards. With advanced technology, they took five days longer than in the 1995 elections.
