Has Comelec paid P1.8-B for 82,000 useless PCOS?

The latest agency trying to justify wrong is the Coast Guard. In a statement, acting chief Rear Admiral says there was never any dumping by Malaysia’s Glenn Defense of toxic waste in the waters off Subic Bay. Proof? Well, the Coast Guard doesn’t allow it, he manfully boasts.

Problem is, Glenn Defense itself admits that it did dump kitchen and toilet waste. It even stated the dumping area’s distance from Subic Bay: 37 kilometers. The SBMA tested the effluents and said it was beyond the tolerable toxic level.

Glenn Defense, a contractor of the US Navy, claims that the waste it picked up from one ship was treated. Thus, it says, it was cleaner than normal Filipino household sewage.

Here’s news for that lying contractor. The US Navy itself says that the ship has no waste treatment facility.

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Since Venezuela’s Smartmatic does not possess the source code, its precinct count optical scanners (PCOS) are useless for the May 2013 election. But the question is, has the Comelec paid Smartmatic the P1.8 billion for the purchase of the 82,000 voting machines?

Dominion Voting Systems Inc., the disenchanted real owner of the PCOS technology, believes so. In its reply of Oct. 17, 2012, to Smartmatic’s lawsuit in the US, Dominion said that the latter has been paid either in part or in full. Meaning, the Comelec is tied to Smartmatic, although the latter has no software to run the PCOS.

Comes another question: is this the reason why the Comelec is ignoring the implication of Smartmatic’s admission in its lawsuit? That is, the poll body has paid for machines that, sans the software, will not be able to read and tally the votes accurately?

The Comelec announced last March 13 that it was buying for P1.8 billion the 82,000 machines to be used in the 2013 election. These were the same machines it had leased from Smartmatic for P7.2 billion in the 2010 balloting. Smartmatic said in its lawsuit that since the purchase was inked on March 30, Dominion was bound to provide the software to run the PCOS. Dominion replied that the May 2013 poll was not part of the license it had granted to Smartmatic in Oct. 2009. Thus, it was under no obligation to provide Smartmatic anything.

Smartmatic in its lawsuit filed in Delaware last September is demanding damages from Dominion. It alleged that Dominion, as software provider, withheld from it crucial materials and information in their license agreement. Thus, it was unable to fulfill obligations to the election agencies of the Philippines, Mongolia, and Puerto Rico.

One of the withheld materials is the all-important source code, the computer program that enables the PCOS to read and count votes right. (See Gotcha, 12 and 14 Nov. 2012.) Also missing were the manufacturing information, software updates, and the election management system.

No wonder the PCOS could not perform certain requirements of the Election Automation Act of 2008 and the Comelec-Smartmatic contract of Oct. 2009. In the May 2010 election, it did not issue voters receipts confirming the names they marked in the ballots. And it could not read the signatures of the election inspectors and canvassers.

On Feb. 9, 2010, Smartmatic announced that it already had deposited the source code with the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, in keeping with the law and the contract. Now it turns out that it was never in possession of the source code, and so had nothing to deposit. Election systems seller Johnny Ramos said the Comelec played along with Smartmatic by confirming the deposit that never really happened.

It’s time for the Comelec and Smartmatic to start telling the truth. If not, Congress must step in to investigate. Big taxpayer money is at stake.

Smartmatic admitted in its lawsuit another critical item. It turned out that the license granted by Dominion bound Smartmatic to keep the details and the deal itself secret. Thus, Smartmatic was never transparent with the Comelec.

Information technologists had doubted in 2010 that Smartmatic owned the PCOS source code, but the Comelec kept claiming it did. “Nobody in the software business ever shows its source code to outsiders for it’s like committing suicide,” says IT expert Wilson Y. Lee. “Large corporations build their own expensive system applications to control their own destiny and not be held hostage by software suppliers. The Comelec got hoodwinked.”

Throughout its reply to the lawsuit, Dominion stated that it was never a party to the Comelec-Smartmatic deal. At least two lawyers have told this writer they will sue the election agency and the foreign supplier in Philippine courts.

In the lawsuit Smartmatic also alleged that it spent more than $20 million to fix a bug in Dominion’s PCOS software. This was when the Comelec discovered the problem a few days before the 2010 balloting but after the PCOS machines had been deployed to the polling precincts. The machines could not read the ballots, but Dominion did nothing about it.

Dominion replied that it did solve the issue. It added that the $20-million cost was all Smartmatic’s fault, for ignoring industry practice. That is, voting machines must be tested before delivery to voting centers.

A Comelec source knows what happened. The source recounts that the poll body, for security reasons, did not show Smartmatic beforehand the actual look of the ballots. The lists of candidates’ names happened to be misaligned, making these unreadable by the PCOS. A Dominion whiz programmer in his 20s named Sean Dean fixed the bug overnight.

IT expert and former Comelec commissioner Gus Lagman says there was not much complaining about PCOS malfunctions after the 2010 balloting. This was because the presidential and senatorial tallies pretty much resembled the many reputable surveys before the voting. He could not say, however, if Smartmatic merely mimicked the surveys to make it look like the PCOS worked right. Two officials of the opposition United Nationalist Alliance shudder at the prospect of Smartmatic copying false surveys of the 2013 election.

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Give books this Christmas. Ateneo Press will put all its titles on sale, 10 to 50 percent off, starting today till Dec. 17, 2012. Visit the Bookshop, Bellarmine Hall, Ateneo Campus, Katipunan Avenue, Loyola Heights, Quezon City; or www.ateneopress.org. For reservations and prices, call (02) 4265984 or e-mail [email protected].

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Catch Sapol radio show, Saturdays, 8-10 a.m., DWIZ, (882-AM).

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