Studies are ongoing legally to scrap the Comelec’s acquisition of shady voting machines. Senate Majority Leader Tito Sotto said Saturday a number of lawmakers are convinced the gadgets facilitate poll fraud. “We have tapped experts to find ways to rescind the lease-purchase,” he stated. “Some of them are former lawyer-commissioners of the election body.”
Sotto earlier revealed two instances of electronic cheating in the 2016 national-local balloting using the 97,000 machines. One was the continuous unauthorized transmission of tallies from units two days before Election Day. Computer printouts show the sending of election results from precincts to municipal canvassing centers. From the machine serial numbers and area codes, two such precincts were in public schools in Libon, Albay, and Angono, Rizal, on May 8 to 9, 2016. Another fraud was the transmission of coded messages from the US mainland to the national canvassing center in Manila. That center was set up for the Comelec by Smartmatic, the Venezuelan supplier of the voting machines. Results incredibly were altered, Sotto summed up. Popular candidate Grace Poe for president, and Panfilo Lacson and Juan Miguel Zubiri for senator got impossible zero votes in entire clusters of precincts. Six unnamed candidates benefited, whom Sotto said he would name this week.
When Sotto exposed the fraud in a speech Tuesday, Comelec spokesman James Jimenez had a ready explanation for the transmissions. Supposedly those were machine test runs by Smartmatic and Comelec technicians. Sotto rebutted that the Comelec strictly had ordered then that test transmissions of deployed machines were to be completed by April 23, 2016. Whereupon the units were to be under lock and key until restarted by precinct officers on May 10. Noting that Jimenez virtually confirmed the fraud, Sotto challenged him to show any Comelec resolution authorizing the May 8-9 transmissions.
Lacson has questioned the Comelec secrecy and haste to buy for an additional P2.1 billion the machines leased for P10 billion in 2016. This is not the first time Smartmatic has been accused of fraud, he noted. Sen. Nancy Binay supported the repeal of the wasteful spending. She sought a probe of why Comelec officials say they have no choice but Smartmatic.
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Untangling Smartmatic’s stranglehold contract would only be the first step. Next should be to redesign the Automated Election System. Lawmakers would do well to heed the info-technologists, lawyers, election experts, and political scientists in the AES Watch. They have been exposing Smartmatic’s faults and frauds since 2009, when the first 86,000 machines were lease-purchased for P12 billion. Those gadgets were used only twice, in the 2010 and 2013 elections. It cost the government P5 billion to accessorize them for each of the two polls, plus P11 billion to warehouse them till now.
To begin with, full automation is unnecessary and wasteful. The automation law requires the use of the most suitable, cost-effective system. Smartmatic has made it look like its machines, located at voting precincts and canvassing centers, make for complete, seamless automation. That is a farce. Fraud-prone human intervention exists in several crucial steps in the process of vote casting, verification, counting, canvassing, and transmission.
In manual elections of the past, massive fraud occurred at the canvassing stage. Ballot boxes were waylaid and stolen in physical transit from the polling precincts to the canvassing sites. At the municipal, city, and provincial canvassing centers, votes were altered wholesale for the highest bidders. Perfected was the so-called “dagdag-bawas,” or vote padding-shaving.
Obviously unneeded is to automate at the precinct. There hardly is cheating in the balloting and counting. Each precinct consists of at most only 200 voters. They are family members and neighbors, from the same street or block. Knowing each other, they will not attempt any hanky-panky, lest be ostracized for life. That is suitably Filipino.
Automation must come in after the 200 ballots are tallied within an hour or so from precinct closing. The various precinct counts in a public school are to be tallied, then transmitted by authorized personnel. Political party reps can countercheck the tallies. Simultaneously municipal, district, city, provincial, and national canvassing centers will receive the counts. Through official, mainstream, and social media, these can be checked by precinct voters for accuracy. Voters can watch out for their respective precinct figures, and so are able to participate in the canvassing at various levels.
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“Tres Pares,” the three-man art show by a photographer-painter, a filmmaker, and a music composer, runs only till Saturday, Mar. 17. Don’t miss it at LRI Gallery, N. Garcia St., Bel-Air, Makati.
Quincy Castillo plays on light by first photographing Filipino outdoor scenes, then prints them on canvass and transforms them with acrylic. His series on the Pahiyas Festival and kite-flying are exciting.
Nelson Cruz wields a video director’s eye for islander events, and on icons. Notable are his studies on fishing and group circumcision, and on the Virgin Mother.
Playful and at the same time thought-provoking are Dennis Garcia’s mostly acrylic renderings of his “wicked hidden fantasies.” New works, as in his first exhibit in 2017, take off from songs he wrote for Filipino sound pioneer Hotdog Band. Examples: “Pahipo”, “Nasarapan”. “Pepe (Smith)”, “Lipistik”, and “Pink Boobs”. Others play on double meanings like “Puno ng Buhay”. By “puno” does he mean tree or full?
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Catch Sapol radio show, Saturdays, 8-10 a.m., DWIZ (882-AM).
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