Hacking democracy in the Philippines

On June 13, just a few days from now, the Supreme Court sans CJ Renato Corona will hear and may vote to decide whether or not the Comelec can renew its contract with Smartmatic-PCOS.

If you are committed to democracy in the Philippines and the sovereignty of its people, then you must be concerned, be very concerned. The sovereignty of the people is expressed through periodic elections. But the elections must be real — wherein the sovereign citizen is identifiable through his digital signature and correctly counted as his vote.

That is not what happened in May 2010. The Smartmatic PCOS electoral system disabled the voter’s digital signature. It means that there was no way to identify voters when the votes were counted. In effect no election took place because voting and counting the vote is an integral act. The two cannot be separated. If they are then it is a fake election with the counting manipulated.

Concerned citizens and computer experts have come forward to demonstrate how this happened in the May 2010 elections. As if this were not bad enough, the Comelec has renewed the PCOS contract despite this defect and way after the legal time it is allowed to. Moreover, National Computer Center must issue a certificate to confirm that the digital signature feature has been correctly installed. The violations against the Constitution, the technical flaws and illegalities of the contract are so blatant that we cannot allow this to happen.

We are faced with the disenfranchisement of Filipinos in favor of foreign machines.

The senator-judges were said to hesitate to convict the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court because they were afraid to lose the block vote of INC in 2013. It had put up a million march protest to demonstrate the power of their block vote.

But this was to no avail. More interesting was the cockiness of a top official who said, “Ignore the INC vote, we have the PCOS.”

Finally, watch the documentary Hacking Election in Youtube. It is about automated electoral systems that threaten democracy even in the US.

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I read a recent article on one of the reasons why President Aquino went after CJ Corona hammer and tongs. His conviction had to do with Supreme Court decisions even if the other justices were part of the vote.

One of those decisions was on The Truth Commission that was declared unconstitutional. That was the subject of Aquino’s Executive Order no. 1 reminiscent of his mother’s Executive Order no. 1 that created the PCGG. We all know how the PCGG turned out to be.

The Supreme Court was still deliberating the issue but already a group of experts from the US were in Manila to advise the truth commission. They were Wendy Luers and Adam Levy for the Project on Justice in Times of Transition. The two had the background and experience from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission under Nelson Mandela. It must have been embarrassing to have made the trip with nothing to supervise.

I attended the first meeting held at the Ateneo Law School in which the two were facilitators. I subsequently wrote a column about the meeting.

Among those present were Cesar L. Villanueva, Dean of the law school (a contender for Chief Justice to replace Corona), Annabelle Abaya, former presidential adviser on the Peace Process in the Arroyo government, Sr. Cres of Task Force Detainees and Susan Granada of the Ecumenical Council and Bishop Yniguez and Carolyn Mercado of the Asia Foundation were also there.

The Truth Commission was being created to investigate the “alleged corruption issues in the nine-year Arroyo administration.” Truth commissions are usually engaged after a civil war or the fall of a dictatorship but not after an election.

It is designed to bring out war crimes and human rights abuses committed during the conflict so the country with a new government could come to terms with the tragedy. It seeks to find out just what happened, especially to people who may have just “disappeared.” Who was responsible? Are they to be punished? It means struggling with ideas to understand human nature that leads to such pitiless crimes.

Philippine society had a specificity that did not compare with the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Despite the credentials of the visitors, Filipinos in the group understood the difference. They said bluntly that if it the truth commission were to be used as political vendetta by the winners against the losers in the elections then it would not achieve what needs to be done.

As one of them said “it will be just a witchhunt and will do nothing for the poor and weak.” Truth commissions all sound very nice but would it address the problem of peace and justice?

Someone objected that the truth commission would zero in on the “graft and corruption” of the previous government when there were graver issues like human rights violations that happen again and again in every government.

Moreover, there were bigger, more damaging graft and corruption committed in other administrations including the first Aquino government. 

If the intent of the truth commission is justice then it should encompass all previous governments. The visitors were surprised at the reactions they heard from the group. It included men and women who worked on the ground with victims of human rights and knew what they speak of when they say that a political vendetta would not help the victims in the past and in the future.

The court voted 10-5 to declare Executive Order No. 1 unconstitutional. The justices cited Section 1, Article III of the 1987 Constitution that provides: “No person... shall be denied the equal protection of the laws.”

The majority included non-appointees of former President Arroyo. Executive order no. 1 violated “the equal protection clause of the Constitution inasmuch as it singles out investigation of graft and corrupt practices in the previous administration.”

In the decision, the justices said the justice system “must be made to work to strengthen the rule of law and to last long after the victorious Aquino government is gone.”