Trial begins against former Tokyo Stock Exchange executives who manipulated data in Giamatti’s election win

After three years of waiting, finally on Monday, August 12, the Fifth Criminal Court began the trial of Gustavo Adolfo Castillo González and Benny Obdulio Roman Chiquin, former director and former deputy director of IT respectively at the Supreme Electoral Court (TSE). They are accused of destroying data and duplicating others during the 2019 general elections won by Alejandro Giammattei.

The trial was suspended in 2023, because the judge in the Belgian Deras case at the time declined to continue hearing the case, as one of the witnesses presented was known to her and to avoid suspicion in the case, she chose to separate from her. This delayed the discussion for a year.

Trial begins against former Tokyo Stock Exchange IT executives; lawmaker points to 2019 election discrepancies

Finally, Judge Marjorie Azipuro was appointed to hear the proceedings, and the Office of the Prosecutor for Electoral Crimes presented its initial arguments, in which both former directors were accused of electoral irregularities, including the crimes of destroying computer records and failing to comply with the rules of working from home.

The case

The operation against Castillo and Roman began after a series of discrepancies were reported in the transmission of vote counting data from the first round of the 2019 elections, so the origin was sought, especially if these discrepancies were due to programming errors or some intention to favor a candidate.

Finally, it was found that the program used in the mentioned elections duplicated the data that appeared in box 11 of the table that collected the information, while in box 222 the data entered in box 12 was copied, which is an error that is repeated continuously.

To prevent this from being discovered, the MP pointed out that those currently being prosecuted have deleted the data to make the system square, which is considered a crime.

They were expelled for these mistakes, at the end of the electoral process that gave Giammattei and his Vamos party victory.