Brillantes looking for excuse for looming PCOS failure?

The top defender and the critics of the PCOS were equally aghast, though for different reasons, with the Supreme Court ruling last week. The SC had barred the Comelec from curbing campaign advertising airtime. Seeing it to be overstepping the Comelec’s job, chairman Sixto Brillantes right away offered to resign. Suspicious, the poll watchdog Kontra Daya asked what Brillantes’s real motive was to want to leave. Was he in fact evading a looming failure of Election 2013 due to the PCOS (precinct count optical scanners)?

Other opponents of the PCOS voting machines were as leery of Brillantes’s overture to step down. Two weeks earlier the Automated Election Systems (AES) Watch, of university profs and info-technologists, pondered too if he was looking for an exit scenario. The SC had said then that any group, even if not penurious or marginalized, could join the party-list balloting. Brillantes moaned that the ruling sets back his electoral reforms. But he was a lawyer of 50 years, used to court victories and defeats. So the AES Watch saw in his public carping the makings of a handy excuse from potential collapse of the PCOS.

The setbacks at the SC truly were offending for Brillantes. More so since, there already have been two others since the start of the year. First, the SC stopped the Comelec from tearing down the oversized, misplaced senatorial endorsement posters at the Bacolod City Catholic cathedral. Then it overturned the Comelec’s unseating of a Cavite town mayor. And latest, the rebuke on the Comelec in the party-lists and campaign airtime. Four successive defeats indeed can discomfit even veteran lawyers, more so one as thin-skinned as the Comelec head.

The PCOS skeptics have good reason to conjecture an escape plan, though. Only weeks ago the PCOS, whose multibillion-peso purchase by the Comelec Brillantes so avidly has been justifying, had failed its latest of many test runs. Of 20 units scattered nationwide, some wouldn’t take in ballots or count the votes; others wouldn’t start at all. Embarrassed, Brillantes, who earlier dared the critics to observe the test runs, refused to divulge the accuracy grade. It could only have been below the 99.995-percent requirement of the Automated Election System Act of 2008, the doubters sneered.

Of late Brillantes nervously has been claiming that all’s set for Election Day — all except, well, for the all-important PCOS “source code.” The source code is the set of human-readable commands that will enable the PCOS to recognize genuine ballots, count the votes, and transmit the tallies. Not only does the law require the Comelec to show it to political parties and computer experts at least six months before Election Day. It is also a must for credibility of the results. But here Brillantes is, barely three weeks from the May 13 balloting, still with no source code in hand.

At this point, Brillantes already is in breach of the automation law. PCOS supplier Smartmatic of Venezuela, meanwhile, is in breach of its P9-billion contract with the Comelec. No source code is forthcoming, for Smartmatic does not have it either. The real software owner is Dominion of Canada, which merely licensed Smartmatic in 2009 to lease it to the Comelec for P7.2 billion in the 2010 presidential election. Back then, although required by law and contract, Smartmatic also didn’t submit any source code. This became known only in 2012, when Smartmatic and Dominion sued each other in the US over, among others, profits from the plum Comelec deal. By then Brillantes already had bought, for another P1.8 billion, 82,000 erstwhile leased PCOS units. Brillantes couldn’t take to task his Comelec predecessors of 2010 for signing up the Venezuelan impostor, for he too is already in too deep with it. The automation law states that whoever the voting machine supplier is should also be the software owner-developer. Past and present Comelec bosses ignored the proviso.

Brillantes says that without the human-readable source code, the PCOS will revert to the binary code, which is solely computer-readable. Apart from this being inconsistent with the law and contract, it will not make for credible balloting. Sure, the PCOS can run on the binary code, but will the count be accurate? Will anybody ever know if it isn’t?

To verify the correctness of the PCOS count, the law also requires a random manual audit of at least one PCOS precinct per congressional district. But this too the Comelec has muddled. The Comelec will select the precincts to be audited a week before Election Day, eliminating the element of surprise in randomizing.

If he does resign, Brillantes hopes that President Noynoy Aquino would appoint him ambassador somewhere in Eastern Europe. The wish only bolsters inklings of an exit scenario. Should the PCOS fail, Brillantes would be far from the line of fire: out of sight, out of mind.

Brillantes says that a European ambassadorship really was his preferred reward for lawyering for Aquino to the Presidency in 2010. Just that, the aged Comelec chief suddenly retired then. This further reveals a casual attitude towards laws and rules. An ambassador can be appointed only if there is a vacancy. First in line are career diplomats, over political appointees. And by rule, no one above 70 like Brillantes is ever posted — unless the appointer is callous.

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