As the year 2014 is about to draw to a close, we can’t help but be amazed at how the Commission on Elections (Comelec) has remained steadfast in its resolve to reform the country’s electoral exercise.
So-called electoral reform activists such as the Automated Election System Watch (AES Watch), Citizens for Clean and Credible Elections (C3E) and Philippine Computer Society (PCS) have done everything – from filing court cases to black propaganda – to stop the holding of computerized elections come 2016. But the Comelec, and our courts, simply won’t budge. After all, the latter have the 2010 and 2013 experience to back them up.
It is widely believed that these self-styled reformers are in cahoots with certain vested interests that want the Comelec to purchase an alternative multibillion-peso technology called the Open Election System (OES), which combines manual voting and precinct-level counting with computerized canvassing at the municipal, provincial and national levels.
As part of their agenda, they attempted to have Comelec’s private partner Smartmatic and its AES/Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) system blacklisted and barred from participating in biddings being conducted by the poll watchdog in preparation for the 2016 national elections.
As pointed out by Smartmatic Philippines president Cesar Flores, there is no reason for this Venezuelan company not to participate in the public auctions, considering that the Supreme Court had already ruled with finality on two occasions that the bids and contracts that it won in the 2010 and 2013 polls were “fair, legal and advantageous to the country (Philippines).”
The Comelec’s bids and awards committee (BAC) issued a four-page resolution junking the petition seeking to blacklist Smartmatic filed by C3E on the following grounds: first, that the complainants are not duly authorized observers as far as the Committee was concerned; second, that the complaint for Smartmatic’s blacklisting was premature; and that the BAC’s authority to blacklist based on the supposed misrepresentation of bidders during the bidding process was applicable only to the bidding process at hand and not to the previous auction results.
Flores speculated that the AES/PCOS bashers are mere “fronts for rival firms or groups who are desperately seeking to corner the P2-billion contract while posing as crusaders for clean and honest elections.”
The critics’ lobby for manual voting did not fly simply because of broad and deep support for the AES by the general public, policy makers and civil-society types who fear that returning to the old system would mean returning to the practices of dagdag-bawas and poll violence.
Even legislators had crossed party lines to shoot down the clamor for a return to the cheating-prone manual voting.
Speaker Feliciano Belmonte Jr. has asserted that returning to the manual system is no longer an option following the successful automation of the 2010 and 2013 polls, as he called on the Comelec to ignore the anti-AES groups that “are just making noise and looking for what’s most advantageous to them.”
The Speaker may be referring to the unabashed push by AES/C3E honchos led by ousted Comelec commissioner Augusto Lagman for the OES, which they told the Joint Congressional Oversight Committee (JCOC) on the AES was a lot cheaper at P4 billion to P5 billion as against the P18 billion that the Comelec had originally asked for an automated system in 2016.
Capiz Rep. Fredenil Castro, who chairs the House committee on suffrage and electoral reforms, said that critics would do well to just help the Comelec improve the automated system as they have failed to present “incontrovertible evidence to substantiate their claim” of electoral fraud, and the poll watchdog had handled the past two automated elections very well.
For his part, Parañaque City Rep. Gustavo Tambunting of the opposition United Nationalist Alliance (UNA) emphasized that it would be a nightmare and terrible decision to go back to the old system of manual counting of votes, which takes forever and which allows miscounts and ballot switching and snatching.
Echoing Tambunting’s warning, another oppostion solon—Valenzuela City Rep. Sherwin Gatchalian—said that staging a semi-manual 2016 balloting would be “like going back to the Dark Ages.”
Indra probe ordered
Here’s another proof that the Comelec will not be bullied into submission.
Comelec chairman Sixto Brillantes has ordered an immediate investigation into accusations that Indra Sistemas, S. A., which is one of two company’s that are bidding for a contract to supply Comelec with 23,000 Optical Mark Reader (OMR) machines on a lease basis to augment the 82,000 PCOS machines for the 2016 elections, is linked to corrupt activities in Spain and that the company is partly owned by the Spanish government.
Brillantes said this would clearly raise issues of conflict of interests “since we cannot have a company provide us with technology and operate it while it is controlled by a foreign government.”
Ealier, Comelec’s BAC technical working group reported that out of the 408 items on the technicians’ checklist, the Indra system flunked 121.
Specifically, Indra’s system does not provide serialization of ballots so there is no guarantee that every ballot is unique and not created two or more times.
Indra also failed to prove that the images of the ballots are not sequentially stored in the VCM file system.
When one portion of the demonstrations bogged down, Indra was compelled to turn off the VCM and move the data from the VCM to the ballot decryption system. But when the VCM attempted to read the information on the USB drive, it was blank.
A BAC member said that this is a major problem, as all the election data was lost after the catastrophic failure of the application.
Indra is a military-defense systems specialist trying to break into the automated election system.
Experts warned that “pilot-testing untested voting machines” in 2016 may lead to disaster if numerous technical deficiencies as displayed by the Indra VCMs are experienced during the polls.
“We should be very careful who we allow to supply our elections systems. This is courting danger. If we experience these technical troubles in a massive scale on election day, it may result in the failure of elections,” a BAC official added.
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