Poll watchdogs looking out for Pinoy-made automated election system

MANILA, Philippines - Two poll watchdog groups are now searching for a Filipino-made system for automated elections as they reiterated their opposition to the use of precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines.

In a statement, the Automated Election System Watch (AES Watch) and the Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPeg) said the “quest aims to look for an election technology system crafted through Filipino information technology (IT) expertise.”

The search is open to IT programmers, professionals, and students.

AES and CenPeg have been opposing the use of PCOS machines by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) in the May 2010 election.

The Comelec is also planning to use the machines in the Aug. 8 regional election in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.

Newly installed Commission on Elections (Comelec) Commissioner Augusto Lagman used AES and CenPeg in questioning the accuracy of the PCOS machines during the 2007 mid-term polls.

The two groups claimed the machines are “defective in terms of technology, transmission infrastructure, management, and legal implementation.”

“The Smartmatic-supplied PCOS technology was full of bugs and errors, and the 99.6 percent accuracy rate of the Comelec’s random manual audit falling radically short of the required 99.995 percent accurate rate, hence, is not fit for use in any election,” noted Pablo Manalastas of AESWatch.

“Until now, none of our (AES Watch) findings on the automated election system that was implemented one year ago has been rebutted by either Comelec or Smartmatic,” he added.

CenPeg director for Policy Studies Bobby Tuazon disputed Comelec’s claim of Smartmatic’s “private intellectual property right” over the election technology.

He said that it runs counter to the election as a public political exercise.

“The technology was paid for by the Filipino taxpayers at P7 billion and therefore any claim of ‘private intellectual property’ is inappropriate. The people’s right to know about the trustworthiness of the technology through an independent source code review supersedes any claim – false as it is – of private ownership,” Tuazon added.