Comelec, Smartmatic deny cheating in revising server script

MANILA, Philippines — The Commission on Elections (Comelec) on Thursday denied cheating allegations made by the camp of vice presidential candidate Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. in the move to revise part of the programming script.

Comelec Chair Juan Andres “Andy” Bautista said the small change in the code was only "cosmetic" but it does not change the values in the transmission of votes from the Vote Counting Machines to central servers.

He said the that a programmer from supplier Smartmatic merely replaced the letter "ñ" with "n" from some candidates' names to address complaints of a media outfit that the "ñ" is being translated to a question mark when displayed.

He noted that Filipinos have a lot of names with "ñ" making the change necessary, citing senatorial candidate Getulio Napeñas and the late presidential candidate Roy Señeres.

The technical support team of Smartmatic Marlon Garcia then took the initiative to change the code to make it appear as it was spelled and later on informed the parties involved.

"It does not in any way change the results the counting and the canvassing of the votes and the source code of the automated election system," Bautista said at a press conference at the Philippine International Convention Center where vote canvassing is held.

He assured the public that the minor change does not affect results from the manual audit.

"This change was done openly in the presence of the political parties and, in fact, members of media who are present as well as Comelec IT personnel.  There was also a CCTV in place and if you wish to see that, that is also open for viewing so," Bautista said.

"Once again all results can be compared against the printed election retursn of all VCMs the electronic results transmitted from all the VCMs the results in Comelec's central server and the transparency server," Bautista said.

For its part, Smartmatic assured the public that the change was only "minor."

"It's only changing the name of question mark for an ñ, so it's not touching any of the numbers and that will be shown once we have the script,"  Smartmatic Philippines General Manager Elie Moreno said.

Poll Commissioner Christian Robert Lim admitted that "there were lapses in this protocol" for he should have been informed first prior to changing the hashcode.

"In fact the change was made and the parties were only informed after the change was made," Lim said.

Lim assured that they will show to the public the original script and its hashcode as well as the changed script and its new hashcode for comparison. — Video by Efigenio Toledo IV