Comelec tolerating Smartmatic’s lying

How much can a United Nations expert learn in five days about human trafficking in the Philippines? Plenty, according to UN Special Rapporteur Joy Ngozi Ezeilo, who barnstormed Manila, Cebu and Zamboanga last Monday to Friday.

Nigerian lawyer Ezeilo is to submit her findings to the UN Human Rights Council. To be included in her report are the “many efforts of various government agencies” to curb trafficking of women and minors.

There are negatives too, such as, that human trafficking is underreported. Ezeilo did not give figures about it during her press briefing last Friday in Makati. But government and NGO numbers do vary widely, from 100,000 to 500,000 Filipino trafficking victims to America and elsewhere every year. Next to narco-trading, human trafficking is the fastest growing transnational crime.

Ezeilo met with members of the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking, women’s and migrant workers’ associations, and victims. Despite the Philippine drive against trafficking, she said, it still needs to improve six concerns. These are: build a good data base, raise public awareness, train law enforcers and social workers, hasten criminal proceedings, provide alternative livelihood, and increase funding.

Depending on Ezeilo’s report, government agencies would gloat about their successes or seethe about her ignoring these. A dozen NGO leaders joined the press meeting to try — in vain — to tell her about perceived government failures. Some of them said she seemed to gloss over the government’s violations of the right to travel in its spotty policy against trafficking.

Indeed, Ezeilo noted, the government was able to secure only two convictions of labor-related trafficking in the past two years. But did she hear about the arbitrary offloading of Filipinos from outbound flights on suspicion of being trafficked, the NGO leaders wondered?

The Bureau of Immigration has been boasting of offloading nearly 200 travelers suspected of being illegally recruited each day at airports. Mostly stereotyped provincials, they total about 120,000 since August 2010. The government has not reported about helping any of them get refunds of airline tickets (at least P35,000 each), travel taxes (P1,620), and airport fees (P750).

Women, minors and even men are trafficked overseas for slavery, prostitution, field and sweatshop labor, adoption, forced marriage, organ and other body parts, warfare, and rituals.

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Ang isda nahuhuli sa bunganga (a fish is hooked by the mouth), the Tagalogs say. And the Philippines’ foreign supplier of automated voting machines has been caught lying. This, from its own words in a lawsuit in America.

Smartmatic International Corp. stated in the US case, for one, that it never got hold of the source code for its voting machines in the 2010 election. This is contrary to its public claims in the Philippines from 2009 to today.

The source code is the computer program that enables Smartmatic’s 82,000 precinct-count optical scanners (PCOS) to read ballots. In failing to possess the program, Smartmatic in effect admitted that it has been in breach all this time of its contract with the Comelec.

The list of commands in the source code can show how accurately or wrongly it reads and tallies votes. Under the Election Automation Act of 2008, the supplier must make the source code available for scrutiny by information-technology experts. In its lease-sale contract of the PCOS units, Smartmatic was required to deposit the program with the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. Now it turns out that it made no such move — a serious violation of the security provisions of the multibillion-peso contract.

By implication, the Comelec has been abetting Smartmatic’s shams. Why the poll body has been doing this for four years now, it must be made to explain.

Smartmatic sued in Delaware last September its provider of software and technics, Dominion Voting Systems Inc. The two are long-time competitors, Smartmatic in the direct-recording electronic model, and Dominion in the PCOS. But Smartmatic side-contracted Dominion in 2009 for the PCOS, which the Comelec preferred over the DRE.

This in itself broke the automation law, which requires the supplier to own the technology to be supplied. Lawmakers had anticipated that the Philippines might have no control over foreign second-party technologists. What they feared is coming true.

In the 52-page lawsuit, Smartmatic cried that Dominion interfered with its businesses in the Philippines and two other countries. Dominion did so in seven ways, Smartmatic said:

(1) improper termination of its license agreement;

(2) non-delivery of fully functional technology for the 2010 polls;

(3) failing to provide technical support in that balloting;

(4) failing to help find alternative uses for the licensed products;

(5) withholding information on the licensed technology;

(6) frustrating Smartmatic’s leasing and sale of the technology; and   (7) failing to place in escrow the required source code, hardware design, and manufacturing information.

Filipino IT experts had decried Smartmatic’s refusal to have the source code examined six to 12 months before the May 2010 election. Smartmatic in turn had claimed that the program was available at the Comelec head office, and all the experts needed to do was review it there. The Comelec then and now echoed the Smartmatic line.

Business and IT leaders had doubted Smartmatic’s ability to lease out 82,000 ballot readers. Its background was shady, having been born in closed-door Venezuela, moved to Barbados then listed in The Netherlands — while having no track record in the PCOS system. Still the Comelec contracted it in June 2009 for P7.2 billion, two months after a bidding in which Smartmatic’s machines kept bogging down.

Aside from supplying the PCOS units, Smartmatic also bagged other Comelec plum contracts for the 2010 polling. Among these was P500 million to supply and transport the ballots and to warehouse the 82,000 voting machines.

Consequently, Smartmatic bagged PCOS contracts in Mongolia and Puerto Rico. But when the governments of the two lands discovered that Dominion was the true owner of the PCOS software and system, they contracted the firm directly.

It was different in the Philippines. Last March the Comelec decided to buy Smartmatic’s leased machines for another P1.8 billion. The only IT expert among the seven election commissioners opposed the idea. The Congress Commission on Appointments froze his confirmation, and Malacañang replaced him.

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