Aliens (mis)managed 2010 polls

While public attention is focused on assessing the Aquino administration’s first 100 days, it is also worthwhile to review critically how the May 10 elections were conducted through the automated election system (AES).

Such a review is needed to get clear, convincing answers to the many questions about the accuracy, security, and reliability of the technology used, how these aspects were handled by Comelec and Smartmatic, the foreign supplier of the PCOS machines used to count the votes, and whether the same machine should be used in the 2013 elections.

Thanks to the perseverance of the Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG) and the Supreme Court’s decision last September 21 on the center’s petition for mandamus, the way has been cleared towards unraveling the answers to these questions. How?

Key here is the so-called source code, described by the election law (RA 9369) as the “human readable instructions that define what the computer equipment will do.” In its decision, the SC directed the Comelec to make the source code for the AES used in the elections “immediately available to CenPEG and all other interested political parties or groups for independent review.”

Yet, Comelec’s full compliance may not be easy to attain. For one, it has set guidelines for source code review “under a controlled environment” in which it exercises control. The Comelec has also refused to disclose 21 vital election documents requested by CenPEG and other groups. Counterchecked with the source code, such documents can help test and validate Comelec’s claim of election success and dispel allegations of electronic rigging.

On the other hand, CenPEG says, disclosure of the documents can help establish “solid proofs and empirical data to prove automated cheating” that IT experts believe could have happened given the faults that have been discovered in the PCOS machines and in the election process.

Last October 5, at the Club Filipino, I joined over 100 people who listened to the reports of CenPEG and AES Watch, a grouping of various organizations united on ensuring transparent and credible elections in 2010.

AES Watch presented its final consolidated StarCard report that gave the Comelec and Smartmatic-TIM mostly negative ratings on many aspects of AES implementation. CenPEG presented the major findings of its Project 3030 AES Report, the sixth of a series of studies since the August 2008 ARMM automated elections. The project identified 30 AES vulnerabilities and proposes 30 corresponding safeguards. It is co-sponsored by the European Union.

The CenPEG report is based on a month-long monitoring of election incidents with thousands of trained poll watch volunteers in 50 provinces, extensive case studies in nine provinces, consultations with IT experts and project partners. Among the highlights, some already reported in the mass media, are the following:

On election day, many PCOS machines, delivered late, malfunctioned or shut down. Non-IT technicians were hired for machine maintenance and troubleshooting. Reconfigured CF cards were delivered late. Defective memory cards were used. Unofficial thermal paper was used extensively. Only half of the ultra-violet scanners bought to verify ballot authenticity were used. Chaos, delays and irregularities in voting, and disfranchisements happened in many clustered precincts. Vote-buying, pre-shading of ballots, “flying voters” were widespread. Whew!

What else? There were no digital signatures on the election returns, rendering them vulnerable to tampering and manipulation. Glitches in the transmission of votes counted were extensive at precinct and municipal levels.

More: Voting turnout was only 75 percent, the lowest in national elections since 1986. It took a full month to proclaim President Aquino as winner, whereas it took only 19 days to proclaim Joseph Estrada in 1998.

The final testing and sealing of the PCOS on May 3 already showed the problems that would occur on election day, but there was no more time to correct them. Training of BEI members and voters education were both inadequate. Mock elections and field tests did not simulate actual conditions as required by law, thus rendering them useless.

A factor to these failures, the CenPEG report points out, is that the Smartmatic PCOS technology “is the lowest end in the international market” and “the fact that the machine is prone to tampering was hidden from the public.” It has a console port that can enable another computer connected to it to access its internal mechanisms, including the software.

Filipino IT experts assert that the Comelec should have harnessed Filipino IT ingenuity instead, as this has been proven reliable here and abroad. Good point.      

Then there is a legal issue. Lawyer Harry Roque contends that the Comelec may have violated the requisite 60-40 ratio in favor of Filipino control in the Smartmatic-TIM joint venture, by acceding to an arrangement whereby the single Smartmatic representative in the board must be counted in to constitute a quorum. That virtually gave Smartmatic veto power.

No wonder, when hard questions were raised by members of Congress the Comelec yielded to Smartmatic’s two representatives to give the final word on the AES implementation. Indeed, Comelec still has a lot of explaining to do.