The Court of Appeals for Civil and Commercial Matters, Fifth Chamber of the Capital, on August 28, 2026, upheld the rejection of a request to access the source code of the voting machines that will be used in Paraguay’s municipal elections on October 4.
The decision, recorded in Judgment and Order No. 133, upheld Judgment No. 374 of August 21, issued by the Civil and Commercial Court of the 19th Turn, which had denied the action brought by computer technician Luis Carlos Benítez Aguilar against the Superior Court of Electoral Justice (TSJE), Paraguay’s electoral authority.
Benítez had requested, in digital format, the identification of components subject to licenses such as GPL, LGPL, MIT and BSD, as well as the source code and their corresponding verification hashes. The requested hashes would enable verification of whether the corresponding files or modules had changed.
The court said the TSJE had provided the available administrative and technical information and indicated sources for consultation. In the judges’ view, however, the right of access to information does not automatically guarantee a complete copy of the code or authorize its publication, especially when equipment-leasing contracts, intellectual-property rights and developments belonging to third parties are involved.
Linneo Augusto Ynsfrán Saldívar presided over the panel, which also included Rocío González Morel and Pierina Ozuna Wood, the latter serving on an interim basis. The decision stressed that electoral-audit mechanisms are relevant to monitoring the machines, although they do not replace the obligation to respond objectively to information requests.
Benítez presented 18 arguments against the lower-court decision. He argued that open-source programs are not secret and that licenses such as GPL and LGPL generally allow access to, use of and redistribution of the code. He also cited Article 28 of the Constitution and Law No. 5,282/2014, which establish access to public information and a presumption of maximum disclosure.
The technician also argued that, if protected passages existed, the TSJE should at least provide the identification of the components, the portions covered by open licenses and the hashes, instead of broadly denying the request.
Judge Pierina Ozuna, for her part, found that the claim concerning the open nature of each module would require technical expertise. In her reasoning, the author holds exclusive moral and economic rights of disclosure, making unauthorized disclosure prohibited by law. She placed the case within the reserved-information exception under Article 22 of Law No. 5,282/2014 and noted that the TSJE leases the machines without necessarily owning the source code.
In practice, the decision leaves the software of the machines planned for the 2026 municipal elections without full disclosure. The case also exposes the conflict between the transparency needed to allow independent verification and the contractual and copyright limitations applied by the electoral authority.