Genuine audit only option left for credible elections

Malacañang rues the tag that the Philippines is the third worst place for journalists. How can such notoriety be avoided, given reports of impunity like this one, embroiling Dipolog City police chief Reynaldo Maclang?

Irate with a talk-radio critique, Maclang reportedly barged into the announcer’s booth last Friday, banged his .45-caliber sidearm on the desk, then had his men arrest the 50-year-old for libel. Commentator Rodolfo Tanguis’s 6-7 a.m. show was left with nothing but dead air, narrated his colleague Mitchel Bala at DXFL-FM 88.9.

 In fair commentary, Tanguis had twitted Maclang for a string of 19 unsolved homicides. Maclang took offense. Speeding to the radio station, he reportedly locked the announcer’s booth behind him to say his piece on air uninterrupted. His men barred technicians from coming to Tanguis’s aid. “We were scared because Maclang had yet to file a libel case but they already arrested him,” Bala recounted. Up to 9:30 that night Tanguis was still behind bars.

Abetting the misdeed, his superior Western Mindanao police director Juanito Vano Jr. said all Maclang wanted was to air his side. “There was some question-and-answer, after which he invited Tanguis to the police station to file charges against him regarding his accusations,” Vano said.

The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines deplored the arbitrary arrest, threat with a deadly weapon, commandeering of the airwave, and consequent cover-up. It said: “Whatever Tanguis may have done to offend him, Maclang’s reactions clearly overstepped the bounds of both his authority and the law. Surely, even a rookie cop knows enough not to arbitrarily arrest anyone without a proper court-issued warrant on properly filed charges. And surely libel, even if such were indeed the case, is not one of the offenses the commission of which allows for a warrantless arrest. And for Maclang to draw his weapon and slam it in front of Tanquis is a clear abuse of authority and as grave a threat as anyone, especially a person in authority, can make against another person.”

As for Vano, the NUJP added: “His brazen attempt at covering up for Maclang shows why the impunity persists.”

Days earlier in Cabanatuan City, reelectionist Mayor Julius Caesar Vergara reportedly harassed a local TV cameraman who videotaped him jogging with armed men and tailed by a police car marked “427”.

Erme Buendia of TV-48 and brother Eduardo complained to the NUJP that Vergara and company ordered them to delete the tape. When they locked themselves inside the TV station vehicle, the armed men forced it open. Whereupon, police officers Isaias Feliciano and Germino Geminez seized Erme’s camera and bag.

Vergara’s rival for the mayoralty, Anthony Umali, reportedly runs TV-48. The Vergaras are said to own TV-16 and a radio station.

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The source code of the voting machines for Election 2013 at last will be turned over to the Comelec by Friday, chairman Sixto Brillantes sighs in relief. Bickering partners Dominion of Canada and Smartmatic of Venezuela supposedly have inked a truce in order to submit the code, a legal requirement for the conduct of automated elections.

Yet it’s too late for political parties and info-technologists to test the software in time for Monday’s balloting. Such testing normally takes four to six months, sometimes even one to two years.

That’s the Comelec’s fault. It wasted three years, since Election 2010, to get the source code from owner-developer Dominion, because it wrongly kept dealing with middleman-impostor Smartmatic. Even at that, it did not repeatedly test and retest the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines for glitches and fraud. It held mere product demos to sway legislators to fund the P9-billion lease-purchase.

Still Brillantes has the temerity to tell critics to now shut up and help him hold the elections. Those critics are veteran election watchdogs, computer experts, and mathematician-statisticians. It’s Brillantes who must stop antagonizing them with remarks of poll sabotage, a heinous offense, and brags of being a legal luminary, for lawyering is not at stake here but clean, credible elections.

The critics cried that Brillantes has removed crucial security features of the PCOS. No more keying in of personal passwords by three poll inspector-teachers each to boot the 82,000 PCOS units on Election Day; Smartmatic-trained Comelec technicians will do it. That supposes that all 16,500 or so techs are saints. It would take only one person with access to the compact-flash card clipped into any one of the 82,000 machines to corrupt the result with dagdag-bawas (vote padding-shaving). It need not happen with national tallies (senators, party list), but with local (governor, mayor, congressman).

And the CF cards that Brillantes procured, for tens of millions of pesos, is not the WORM (write once-read many) but the rewritable type. Meaning, the embedded program can be altered. Sadly, also removed from the PCOS is the vote verification receipt, by which every voter can check if the machine read his ballot right.

One remaining crucial safeguard is the random manual audit (RMA). This is the surprise physical recounting of the ballots against the PCOS tally.

The critics suggested that, in the absence of a source code review, a manual count be made in all 79,000 precinct clusters. At 600-1,000 ballots per cluster, this won’t take long, since no protests or interjections would be entertained, only pure recounting. Still the Comelec declined, on flimsy alibi of cost saving.

Instead the Comelec will audit one precinct in each of the 239 congressional districts. This is less than the five clusters per district, or 1,145 in all, that it audited in 2010.

The RMA of 2010 was a farce. Although the clusters secretly were drawn by lot on the afternoon of Election Day, the audit teams were slow to mobilize. Instead of starting the audit upon the closing of balloting at 7 p.m., some arrived days later. By then, the PCOS machines and ballot boxes had been returned to Comelec field units and municipal treasurers’ offices. Due to retrieval delays and tampering doubts, the RMA was finished too late in July 2010.

To preclude a repeat this Election 2013, the Comelec is swinging to the other extreme of the pendulum. It will select the precincts to be audited too early, on May 9 four days before Election Day, and announce them on May 11 two days prior. That would alert potential PCOS manipulators to avoid the 239 precincts lest the cheating be detected. It could even lead to the changing of the PCOS unit, although already tested and sealed, assigned to the divulged precinct.

And so it goes....

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