The PCOS machines can no longer be trusted

I fully concur with what our fellow STAR columnist Federico Pascua Jr. queried in his column last Sunday, “Is Comelec Chairman Sixto Brillantes Jr. afraid that if he conceded the flaws of the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) system, the dam might break and wash away the integrity of the 2010 election of President Nonoy Aquino who had appointed him to the poll body?”

Chairman Brillantes should not be worried about that issue simply because the 2010 automated polls and all the technical glitches of the PCOS happened before his watch. He can therefore blame it on former Comelec Chairman Melo. But if he turns a blind eye at the recurring problems of the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS), which is now happening under his watch, then he can no longer escape blame for this mess.

Indeed, these days, everyone is talking about the seriousness of the troubles that the Comelec is having with Smartmatic’s PCOS machines. I don’t blame the people if they are very alarmed that high Comelec officials seem clueless in solving these problems. Either they don’t know how to solve these problems or they have simply decided to force the PCOS on the people.

We saw Cheche Lazaro’s Probe Team in ANC dubbed “Teche na ba O Teka Muna?” This is without a doubt a very well documented, albeit an eye-opening report on the truth behind the PCOS machines like the missing source code and the troubles in Imus, Cavite and Biliran, Leyte, especially in the Antipolo, North Cotabato and Cagayan de Oro, the areas where there were “extra” PCOS machines transmitting at the height of the polls.

If the PCOS delivered a clean and honest count as advertised, these problems would not have occurred. But it did! We also wrote in previous columns about the problems of the PCOS that happened in Compostela, 25 kms north of Cebu City. What was revealing was when Cheche interviewed Eng. Averia who showed her that the transmissions by the PCOS could be hijacked and replaced… and he told her the many ways to do so. So who was responsible for this? Now we are really getting into the bottom of this case, which people have been calling “electronic dagdag bawas.”

We’ve been warning you that we have long suspected that there was a conspiracy with Comelec and Smartmatic to defraud the elections of 2010.

This brings us back to the PCOS machines that were caught “in flagrante delicto” transmitting election results in Cagayan de Oro (CDO), North Cotabato and in Antipolo. Why were these cases never investigated much less solved by the Comelec? In fact, if you asked around whatever happened to those machines, we learned that the police seized it… and since they are under the Comelec during election season, they turned it over to back to the Comelec, with no investigation and no arrests for defrauding the 2010 polls. 

But here’s some indisputable facts, that we learned way back in May 2010 that the compact flash (CF) cards found in a junk shop in CDO were found to be genuine after they were tested by Smartmatic and they found that it was opened with a specific encryption keys. But more importantly, these CF cards were not tampered with and it showed authentic election results. So the question is why were these CF cards discarded in a junk shop?

This is exactly what former Makati Congressman and then chairman of the House committee on suffrage and electoral reforms and now ABS-CBN’s “Teditorial” Rep. Teodoro Locsin questioned, “Why were the CF cards thrown away? Nobody can figure this out.” Rep. Roilo Golez then suggested that since the CF cards had done their job, throwing them away would not affect the canvass of votes. Surely Mr. Golez who studied in Annapolis could have given a better point of view. If we used his argument, we would have CF cards scattered and strewn in the garbage dumps or junk shop all over the nation. In my book, the CF cards were discarded and replaced with the pre-programmed CF cards. This is a logical conclusion.

But despite all these troubles happening with the PCOS, the Comelec never cared to get into the bottom of this mess. Nor did the Comelec’s citizen arm, the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) make a case out of this. I guess it is because the PPCRV do not understand computerized elections. I just hope that the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) would no longer trust the PPCRV to help them for the coming elections for their “silence was deafening” about the 2010 polls. In the end, even the Congressional investigation on this closed their session with so many unanswered issues; this is why we are still asking questions today.

Meanwhile, we ask, how many more PCOS machines were operating outside the polling places where they are supposed to be? As I pointed out, a friend of mine even admitted to me that he had a PCOS machine in his residence a week before the May 10, 2010 polls. But these were all hush-hush. So can we still trust the PCOS machines? Not on the life of our democracy!

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