Claro reaffirms their network is safe and reliable for the elections

SANTO DOMINGO. The presidents of the telecommunication company Claro, Oscar Peña, and of the Central Electoral Board, Roberto Rosario, guaranteed that the transmission of the elections results will be carried out with the greatest security, brevity and transparency.

After holding a meeting of more than an hour with Peña and other executives of the company, Rosario said that yesterday was "an extraordinarily important day" for him because after what was talked about and the explanations received on the provisions made by Claro, "he has sufficient confidence and tranquility that all the data transmission process is secure."

The first in speaking at the improvised press conference was Peña who explained that Claro has "the biggest, strongest and trustworthy network in the country, over which the greatest proportion of data in the Dominican Republic is transmitted, including sectors as sensitive as the national financial system."

He stressed that over the past five years, this company has invested more than US$250,000,000 to strengthen the security measures and the reliability of its performance.

"In that way, we, as the principle provider for the JCE, have given them the support that our day to day clients receive, where they make hundreds of millions of calls and thousands of gigabytes are transmitted without any problems. We have placed before the Board all of our infrastructure and we guarantee the levels of responsibility that se have always provided," said Peña.

The president of Claro said that he company's network, responsible for more than 90% of the communications platform of voice and data for the election process, is today "more secure than ever before."

"We have given all the confidence and security to the Central Electoral Board that the network will be functioning correctly, under the highest standards of security and that there is no possibility that this transmission of the election results can be altered in any way," stressed Oscar Peña.

The Claro executive called upon the citizens and the Plenary of the JCE to be confident that the process will be as successful as always.

At the same time the president of the JCE said that he could assure some leaders that had communicated with him and the country that "we are going down the right path."

He said that when the election results are in the hands of the JCE, they will be used correctly and that there is not any possibility that a single vote will be misplaced.

For Rosario, the measures adopted by Claro surpass the levels of transparency and security by a wide margin. They said that they would send a document later with even more details on what they talked about in the meeting.

During the press conference the reporters were not allowed to ask any questions, nor were any members of the Plenary present.

The meeting took place after the program of Nuria Piera on which the JCE president, Roberto Rosario, expressed his worries because Claro had not given him assurances that the data transmission would be invulnerable.

Also, the official seemed uneasy regarding the consequences which might result from the simultaneous transmission of the election results to the media, an initiative which he has pushed, and which was approved by the Plenary of the JCE, and which caused diverse reactions from different sector and inside the JCE itself.

The letter from Hipolito Mejia

The presidential candidate from the Dominican Revolutionary Party, Hipolito Mejia, sent a letter to Roberto Rosario in which he expressed his "deep worry" which his statements regarding the uses that could be made of the election results by those who receive the simultaneous transmission. He believes it is important that the JCE avoid situations that could cloud and damage the election process and the peace of the nation. "Avoid this as president of the JCE, by limiting the simultaneous information of the acts to those who should have them for institutional reasons," he suggested.