Smartmatic vouches for integrity of vote counting machines

MANILA, Philippines — Voting technology services provider Smartmatic Philippines yesterday vouched for the integrity and reliability of its system, which has been used in thousands of elections with nearly four billion votes cast worldwide.

Smartmatic country president Jane Coo issued the statement as Congress is looking into the possibility of implementing a “hybrid” election system or a combination of manual counting and automated system where election officials would fill out election returns to be electronically transmitted to main servers.

“Our system is accurate and 100 percent auditable. It was designed to detect inconsistencies at any level, even at the precincts. Every step of the way, the system generates audit trails, which allow all stakeholders to validate the accuracy of results,” Coo said.

During the 2016 elections, some 2.7 million election returns (ER) were printed out by the vote counting machines (VCMs), according to Coo.

“These are 2.7 million solid and unassailable records of votes,” she said, adding the audit trail has been reviewed extensively, “proving every single time the results were accurate and truly reflected the will of the Filipinos.

The Commission on Elections (Comelec) earlier this year renewed its contract with Smartmatic to supply VCMs for the 2019 midterm elections.

Coo noted the National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel) assisted Comelec in conducting a random manual audit which determined that the electronic count matches the manual count 99.96 percent of the time.

She said the negligibly small variance can be attributed to human error. All other audits conducted have indicated that the election results are legitimate.

“To this day, absolutely nobody has shown an election return that does not match the transmitted result. The reason is simple: no cheating occurred,” she said.

Coo encouraged Filipinos to learn more about Smartmatic and its successful election projects all over the world.

She had said earlier Smartmatic is studying the possibility of using blockchain technology in the country’s elections that would allow voters to vote online from the comfort of their homes while making the polls even more secure.

She said the European Union recently awarded a consortium led by Smartmatic with a three-year contract to develop new cryptographic tools to protect the data and privacy for numerous applications, including elections.

Source code review

Meanwhile, the Comelec may start next month the local source code review for the VCMs to be used in next year’s elections despite the continued opposition to the re-use of the Smartmatic technology.

The VCMs are the same automated election system used by the Comelec in the 2016 polls. They were supplied by Smartmatic which also provided the voting system in the 2010 elections.

“We hope that the local source code review can start in September. This will give us enough time to conduct a thorough local source code review,” Comelec spokesman James Jimenez told reporters.

The Comelec, according to Jimenez, is jumping straight into the “customized source code” by skipping the “baseline source code” review which was done in the 2016 elections.

Jimenez said they are hopeful they can begin the international source code review not far from the local review. 

The international review, however, can take place only after the Comelec has completed the required public bidding for the service provider.

“This will still be undergoing international code evaluation. Hopefully, we can send it close to the start of the local source code review,” he added.

Under Republic Act 9369 or the poll automation law, the Comelec is required to “promptly make the source code available and open to any interested party or group, which may conduct their own review.”

The source code is the alpha-numeric human readable instructions that dictate what the VCM should do.– With Sheila Crisostomo