Gordon worried about election turnout

MANILA, Philippines - Former senator Richard Gordon yesterday said he has fears over how the May 9 polls would turn out, as he promised to probe why the Commission on Elections (Comelec) failed to fully implement the automated election law if he gets elected.

“I look at the elections with trepidation. It is only in this country that we do not enforce the law, where we allow agencies such as the Comelec or any other department in the country to amend the law without being congressmen or senators,” Gordon told The STAR yesterday in a meeting with reporters and editors.

He added that the Comelec “does not have a sparkling record in terms of enforcement.”

If elected as senator, he would investigate the poll body on the partial implementation of the automated elections law and on why the source code has not been explained by the poll body.

“They have not implemented the automated election law in full. The source code has not been adequately exhibited or explained. In fact, if you ask anybody in this country, they do not know about the source code. We missed out on a golden opportunity to educate the young,” Gordon said.

Recalling what happened in the previous polls, Gordon said that the Comelec could have simply invited university students and political parties to check the code.

“Up to now, nobody knows what the source code is. The last two elections have not been attended to by the source code. There is no source code. They pretended. I know because I argued the same thing in 2013 and having authored the law, they know the deadline was three months before the election and it was two weeks before the election and they still do not have the source code. The Supreme Court ordered them to show it to Gordon, they never did,” he insisted.

Meanwhile, vice presidential candidate Sen. Ferdinand Marcos Jr. yesterday said his legal team has documented 15 cases of vote receipt discrepancies in the overseas absentee voting.

With only six days to go before elections, his camp has shifted toward guarding the votes on May 9.

“Of course, we are still campaigning but we are intent on making sure that all our votes are counted… it’s not over until it’s over,” Marcos said.

Guarding the votes, he added, is an essential component as his legal team completed documenting discrepancies in the absentee voting in Hong Kong, Dubai, Japan and California.

Former Metro Rail Transit general manager Al Vitangcol III also yesterday petitioned the Supreme Court to compel the poll body to take more measures to prevent electronic cheating in the country’s third automated polls.

In a 17-page petition for mandamus, Vitangcol, who was dismissed over a bribery charge, asked the high court to order the Comelec to conduct an inventory of identification numbers of vote counting machines (VCMs) and make a list of all the Internet protocol (IP) and Media Access Control (MAC) addresses that it will use in its Virtual Private Network, together with the geographical locations to be used for the polls.

“We want to know these details so that in case there will be electronic cheating, there will be a way to trace it,” Vitangcol told reporters.

An IP address is the numerical label assigned to each device participating in a computer network, while a MAC address is a globally unique identifier assigned to network devices often referred to as hardware or physical address of the device. Both are considered fingerprints of individuals in cyberspace.

Vitangcol cited reports in the 2010 polls about “rogue” machines that were allegedly used to manipulate the results of the elections, referring to the 60 units of precinct count optical scan recovered in the house of a Smartmatic-TIM technician in Antipolo City.

“Transmissions from these ‘rogue’ machines would have been easily traced in the transmission logs, particularly through their MAC and IP addresses... Clearly, respondent Comelec must act now and lay the groundwork to prevent it from happening. Part of this groundwork is to make a thorough inventory of all the MAC and IP addresses,” read his petition.

Vitangcol believes there is a risk that a sniffer could capture the data transmission in next week’s polls when the VCMs transmit the election returns to the Comelec’s central server, the transparency server and another server at the joint congressional canvassing.

“Without such inventory of MAC addresses and IP addresses, the public – even respondent Comelec – would end up scratching their heads, wondering what went wrong,” Vitangcol argued.   – With Perseus Echeminada, Edu Punay