Vested interests crossed the line

For concerned citizens it seemed futile to cross swords. Another attempt yet again at Charter change was squelched for “honest” elections. There were those who believed that when they cast their vote, that vote would be counted and counted quickly.

So many trooped to the precincts believing the credibility of computers. At last, we would have the “honest” and “democratic” election touted about as our salvation.

We were entering the modern age to be in step with other countries, including the US, that had looked down on our primitive elections that were prone to cheating.

But when the results came in, our IT experts were alarmed. Their questions were not about who won or who lost. It was about the vulnerability of the ‘automation” itself on which Filipinos placed so much hope. Confronted with doubts, they asked: “Is it possible to cheat in automated elections?” Many of them hesitated to ask because they might appear foolish with Smartmatic officials saying on television that electronic machines cannot lie or cheat. But soon, reports about incidences, behavior, manipulation punctured the cockiness of Smartmatic experts.

How was it possible that Comelec-Smartmatic were able to fix some 70,000 PCOS (Precinct Count Optical Scan) machines that they claimed had to be reconfigured for some technical errors in three days before the elections? What were PCOS machines doing in a house in Antipolo? What about those found in a junkyard in Cagayan de Oro? And so on and so forth.

Moreover, in this age of the internet, all one has to do is google for a background check on Smartmatic. It faces suits around the world for their automated voting system. Why were they chosen? And when the complaints and reports came in why did media or government not care to look at the allegations?

Well, we now have all the candidates, including a President, elected by the PCOS machines. All should now be quiet in the protest front against the Comelec-Smartmatic results of May 10. Not so, I am told.

The protest front has been quietly building their case, organizing and reinforcing their evidences. We do not know of it because oligarchic media and government have stonewalled the protests.

I think they have not reckoned with the fact that the protest is not about winners and losers. It is about the automated election itself that has evoked such anger and fierce nationalism not seen perhaps since the days of the Philippine wars of independence. They may not count in the hundred thousands or the millions but this is a determined band of crusaders who will not be fooled nor be made fools. To them vested interests have crossed the line.

I would not dismiss the power of this group. To quote from Margaret Mead: “Never underestimate the ability of a small group of individuals to change the world. Indeed, they are the only ones who ever have.”

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On June 19, 2010 Roberto Verzola and his group Halalang Marangal made a simple request to put the ballot images online to restore the democratic principle of counting in public. Gus Lagman, a well-known Filipino IT expert complained about Comelec’s partiality towards foreign groups.

One would expect that if Comelec-Smartmatic and our government leaders are so sure about the election results, they should accede to the request.

“Halalang Marangal proposes that the ballot images now on memory cards be unencrypted and made public.

The two basic electoral principles in a democracy are voting in secret and counting in public.

Voting in secret means keeping a voter’s choices secret from others. Putting the ballot images online does not violate this secrecy.

Voting in secret does not mean keeping a voter’s choices secret from himself. In fact, this is what the Comelec did when it ordered the voter verification feature of the PCOS machines disabled, keeping the electronic ballot secret from the voter himself.

Votes represent the collective voice of the people therefore counting votes in public is a basic feature of a democracy. The PCOS machine denied voters and candidates the right to see the votes being counted and tallied. In effect, our votes were counted in secret, not in public. This secret counting of votes is a big step backward, compared to the old system where voters and candidates were able to see with their own eyes if their votes were being registered, counted and tallied correctly.

Let the ballot image files on the CF cards of these precincts be unencrypted and released to the public through the Web and on DVDs, so that the public may go through every ballot image in any particular precinct and compare its count with the count posted on the Comelec website or the audit count arrived at by the audit team.

Allowing the public to actually count the votes in the ballots, as we have always done in the past, should settle once and for all public concerns about the accuracy and integrity of the automated elections.

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Gus Lagman in his column To Take a Stand lambasts Comelec’s partiality for Smartmatic despite the fact that it offered a solution that was completely foreign — “foreign hardware, foreign software, foreign integrator/implementor.”

“We presented this PC-based solution to the commissioners, not as vendors, but as a group of Filipino IT professionals who believe that should the Comelec espouse this solution, it can then simply source the PCs locally and outsource the implementation to local systems integrators.

“It awarded a P70-million contract to Systest Labs, an American company, in October 2009, and sent word to the locals that they will have to wait until Systest finishes its review and submits its report, before the Comelec would make the source code available to locals.

To add insult to injury, while Comelec made all the necessary documents available to Systest for their intensive review in their US offices, it would only make the documents available to the locals under a controlled environment.

Comelec asked the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (google this group for background), yet another foreign organization, to audit the manner by which automation was implemented in the last elections, while denying the Center for People Empowerment on Governance (CenPEG), a UP-based organization, documents that it needs to do a comprehensive evaluation of the same elections,” This is strange.

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The Automated Election System Watch (or AES Watch) will hold a post election summit on Tuesday, October 5 at 8:30 a.m.-1 p.m., Club Filipino in Greenhills to report on findings by different groups in a town hall meeting for ordinary citizens.