Smartmatic all set, Comelec unready

Smartmatic says it’s 100 percent ready for Election Day. Ready to what, rig the results?

Election automation experts cannot but be suspicious. The Venezuelan voting-machine seller has pulled off too many shady deals with the Comelec. It is tainting the credibility of Election 2016.

The backdrops for the balloting on Monday are worrisome, to say the least. The Comelec official website has just been hacked. Sensitive personal data of 55 million voters, which the Comelec negligently included, have been dumped on the Internet. Cybercriminals likely have copied the fingerprints, photographs and signatures. Voters will fall prey to blackmail, extortion and cyber-fraud.

Smartmatic is striving to dissociate itself from the Comelec fiasco. It claims that its automated election system is hack-proof. Experts have never disputed that. What they’ve been saying all this time is that Smartmatic’s machines are prone to internal manipulation.

That Comelec/Smartmatic will fudge the vote count looms. They are conspiring to issue false voter receipts. Those receipts will not contain vital info such as voting machine serial number; date and time; precinct number and location; province, city, municipality or congressional district. It will thus negate the objective of the receipt.

Officially called VVPAT, for Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail, the receipt has a dual role. First is for the voter to check if the machine read his ballot right. Second is for all voters to verify that the machines tallied and transmitted the votes correctly. Without the vital info, it will not serve as paper audit trail.

Further making the balloting doubtful are two latest deals of Comelec and Smartmatic. One is the supply of thermal paper for the VVPAT and the precinct tallies that the voting machines will churn out. Smartmatic suddenly opted to donate the paper stock after losing the bidding. A competitor had offered only half Smartmatic’s bid, but for some eerie reason, the latter is bent on using its own paper; hence the “donation,” which it later will use for tax deduction.

The second contract is for control of the National Technical Support Center. The NTSC is to serve as call center for field technicians to contact in case of machine or transmission breakdown. The Comelec unceremoniously disqualified the lower bidder. It gave Smartmatic the NTSC contract at a very questionable price. Smartmatic’s bid was P122,710,999. That’s only 40 centavos lower than the Comelec’s approved budget of P122,710,999.40. (See Gotcha, 20 April 2016, http://www.philstar.com/opinion/2016/04/20/1574819/comelec-dumbly-accepts-smartmatic-sly-donation)

The Comelec is legally incompliant for Election Day. It has failed to secure from the multi-sectoral Technical Evaluation Committee (TEC) a crucial document. This is the certification that Comelec preparations conform with the provisions of the Automated Election Act of 2008. Under that law, the certification must be issued 90 days before Election Day. Without it, any and all voting results – presidential, congressional or local – can be questioned in court or the Election Tribunals.

Former Comelec chairman Sixto Brillantes Jr. belittles that legal requirement of a TEC certificate. He claims that the 2010 elections pushed through despite the lack of the source code review six months before Election Day. He is neither here nor there. He would ignore all the provisions of the Automation Law to push through with a sloppy automated election.

Brillantes oversaw the 2013 congressional-local elections. Back then he discarded the five basic security safeguards of the voting machines. That resulted in the statistically improbable 60-30-10 percent outcome for Administration-Opposition-Independent senatorial candidates in all 87,000 precincts. Brillantes is thus the worst person to talk about clean elections. And credibility is crucial in a presidential contest as hot as the present one.

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Five days before Election 2010, Smartmatic had also bragged to be all set. But etched in Philippine election history is how its voting machines fouled up on the final testing and sealing. That fiasco was reported in this space on May 5, 2010. Excerpts:

“The Comelec has been so busy with rackets instead of preparing for the first nationwide automated election. Thus the inevitable happened. Tests of the first 3,000 deployed precinct-count optical scanners flopped. The PCOS wrongly tallied votes for local candidates. The Liberal Party said the failure rate was 50 percent. Comelec insiders, quoting Filipino staff of Smartmatic, said it was worse.

“If the problem is unsolved, automation would crash. There might not be enough time to fix the glitch.

“The snafus were varied. In some precincts the PCOS malfunctioned because ink shadings of circles on the front page, for national candidates, bled to the back page, for local candidates. In others the machines read only every other line, counting votes even where there were no shadings. Faulty ballot printing further caused PCOS misreading. IT pros from AESWatch and Halalan Marangal had warned Comelec about this. Smartmatic admitted that when it programmed the PCOS, it missed the change in candidates’ listing from vertical to horizontal.

“Smartmatic’s solution is to recall 3,000 PCOS units already fielded to precincts or Comelec offices. Along with units still in the Laguna warehouse, the compact flash cards embedded in each of the 82,200 units will be reprogrammed.

“There’s a catch. Reconfiguring the CF cards would expose even the national tallies to fraud. The PCOS could now be made to transmit padded results to canvassing centers on Election Day.

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Willie Nep’s “Pang-GULO ng Pilipinas” is extended for one night only. Last Saturday’s show that happens only every six years expectedly was a full house.  The presidentiables and the public ask for the chance to see it before voting.

Catch it on Friday, May 6, 8 p.m., at the Music Museum, Greenhills Commercial Center, San Juan City. For tickets call TicketWorld (02) 8919999 or Music Museum (02) 7216726.

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Catch Sapol radio show, Saturdays, 8-10 a.m., DWIZ, (882-AM).

Gotcha archives on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jarius-Bondoc/1376602159218459, or The STAR website http://www.philstar.com/author/Jarius percent20Bondoc/GOTCHA

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