Comelec urged to release source code of precinct count optical scan

MANILA, Philippines - Non-government organization Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPeg) yesterday filed a petition for mandamus before the Supreme Court to force the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to disclose the source code of the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines to the public.

CenPeg said three months have passed since the Comelec en banc approved their request to know the source code, but the poll body has not released it until now.

Fearing the counting machines may be tampered to manipulate the results of the 2010 elections, the petitioner wants the source code of the counting machines reviewed and recorded -before and after elections -by computer experts who have a good reputation within the information technology community and are not linked to the Comelec nor to winning bidder Smartmatic-TIM.

The center said that by not publicly disclosing the source code of PCOS machines, the Comelec is violating Republic Act 9369 or the Poll Automation Law.

“Section 12 (of the law states that) ‘once an AES technology is selected for implementation, the Commission shall promptly make the source code of that technology available and open to any interested political party or groups which may conduct their own review thereof,” CenPeg said.

A source code is a mechanism encoded as a human-readable combination of numbers, letters, punctuation marks, and symbols which tells the specific actions done by a computer.

The source code of the counting machines can be reviewed to make sure their programs comply with the requirements of the election law for counting, canvassing, and transmission of votes. Security flaws can also be identified.

CenPeg has also filed a similar petition before the Comelec along with other groups.

“The voters must be assured that the machines themselves cannot be used as instruments for cheating, that they have been programmed correctly,” they noted.

Other signatories in the petition are the National Secretariat for Social Action, University of the Philippines-Alumni Association, Alliance of Concerned Teachers, National Council of Churches in the Philippines, Ecumenical Bishops Forum, Solidarity Philippines, and various IT experts.

The Comelec has ordered 82,000 PCOS machines, of which 80,000 will be installed in polling precincts while the rest are for backup in case of machine breakdown. – With Sandy Araneta