Smartmatic to issue ‘fake’ voter receipts

The voter receipt that the Comelec is to issue on Election Day will be incomplete. It will contain only the names of candidates that the voter is to mark on the ballot. Absent will be other crucial data: the location (province, city, municipality, district) and number of the precinct; the PCOS number; and the ballot number, time and date.

Thus the purpose of the receipt – as voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) – would be defeated. It would not serve to foil election fraud. On the contrary, it would fool voters that the balloting is clean.

Such slip of paper would be as worthless as fake receipts that cheating sellers give out. Official Receipts must contain not only the name of the buyer, the item purchased, and the amount. It must detail the seller’s name, address, TIN (tax identification number); BIR approval; and date (if possible also time and place) of transaction. An incomplete receipt cannot serve the buyer as proof of purchase, or tax deduction. Even the cheating seller later can deny issuing such false O.R. That’s why such fake is prohibited. Yet it proliferates, due to spotty law enforcement.

If incomplete, the VVPAT too is illegal and contrary to enforcement order of the Supreme Court. The Election Automation Act of 2008 requires the VVPAT as one of five basic security safeguards of the vote counting machine (VCM). The VVPAT serves two roles: First, on the spot, it is the voter’s countercheck if his assigned VCM reads his ballot right. Second, as paper audit trail, it is the electorate’s countercheck if all the 97,500 VCMs counted and transmitted the votes right.

The VVPAT works in tandem with the four other safeguards against VCM fraud: source code review, digital signatures (passcodes) of precinct inspectors and local/national canvassers, ultraviolet light-detector of fake ballots, and post-balloting random manual audit.

Comelec ignored all five safeguards in Elections 2010 and 2013. Thus questionable were the counts by the PCOS (precinct count optical scanners), the unreliably opaque VCM of Venezuelan supplier Smartmatic.

For Election 2016 Comelec installed the U/V-light and digital-signature features. It ran a source code review that was as limited, so farcical, as past ones. The veracity of its random manual audit has yet to be seen. It had to take two unanimous rulings of the Supreme Court to make Comelec-Smartmatic activate the VVPAT feature of the PCOS.

But it’s not to be done right.

When the SC first ordered the Comelec to issue the VVPAT, the latter grumbled to the media, in utter disrespect of the former. Even the ex-chairman sprang out of retirement to defend the Comelec’s no-VVPAT illegality. Supposedly there was no more time and money to implement it, and forcing the issue would lead to election failure. When the SC ruled the second time for VVPAT, the Comelec relented. Outside the courtroom, however, the poll commissioners sniggered that what they would have Smartmatic issue is an incomplete VVPAT.

They had no intention all the while to comply. The incomplete receipt is a blatant disregard of the purpose of the VVPAT. That is, as paper audit trail. As well it is a flout of the SC’s objective in having the VVPAT enforced. As Justice Marvic Leonen stated during the oral arguments, the VVPAT serves as official election paraphernalia. But as incomplete – fake – receipt, the VVPAT cannot be used for the random manual audit, much more for formal electoral protests.

The very material for the VVPAT is malicious. Comelec and Smartmatic plan the receipt to be useless within days after the issuance. For tens of millions of pesos they are buying thermal paper whose print would fade after prolonged exposure to light.

No wonder that info-technologists suspect Comelec-Smartmatic to disuse the VVPAT all along as poll safeguard. The election body and its PCOS supplier are out to cheat the results. Without the VVPAT, Comelec can dictate what figures the PCOS will churn out. Any automated cheating would benefit only the administration party.

Elections need to be not only clean and orderly but also credible. The very incompleteness – falsity – of the voter receipts would make Election 2016 incredible.

Ironically, the incomplete VVPAT would backfire on any Comelec-Smartmatic cheating. Individual voters would be able to check the correctness or incorrectness of their ballot reading. After the first hurdle they would compare their votes with others in their precinct, district, municipality, city, province, and higher. Any result could and would be doubted. No random manual audit, even if cleverly rigged, would convince the electorate of an honest count. Election 2016 would go down in history as the messiest ever. Comelec-Smartmatic perpetrators would be stained forever. The emergent winner by fraud would be unable to govern. Unrecoverable would be the P22 billion so far paid to Smartmatic for the old 86,200 and the new 97,500 PCOS units.

To worsen all that are other frauds. Comelec is again granting Smartmatic a P558-million contract to transmit the results from precincts to canvassing centers. Expect failure. The shady Venezuelan got P350 million in 2010 and P455 million in 2013 for the same. It failed to transmit nine percent in the first and 24 percent in the second – representing tens of millions of votes to put the election results in doubt. There’s also a P30-million to be given away by Comelec for “aprons” to make the precinct inspectors “look nice” on Election Day.

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