Games of endurance

The way the battle is shaping between Smartmatic-PCOS, Comelec and civic groups led by TanDem is looking more and more like a game of endurance. No matter what evidence is presented by the group, Comelec especially through the Chairman’s statements, will not listen.

After the sensational discovery of a 60-30-10 pattern in the senatorial elections last May 10 on all levels, Tandem and groups will not budge – they know they have found something. Some articles have referred to it as the “smoking gun.”But Comelec Chairman Brillantes is unfazed.

He probably thinks that in time the civic groups will give up the struggle and throw in the towel. Comelec will just keep playing deaf and blind and issuing irrelevant statements.

The latest riposte from him when Tandem groups brought in the mathematicians is – well – if they want a recount of votes on the precinct level produce the money — some P200 million to do it.

Who will blink first? In an endurance game, it is a contest of wills and staying power.

In a game of endurance, the prize goes to the protagonist who will continue and last no matter the stress. It is about outlasting one’s opponent rather than making a point.

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I was at the press conference called by Tandem and Co. where mathematicians brought out through graphs and analysis that there was indeed a 60-30-10 pattern in different levels of the last election.

The presentation showed that this pattern is the “smoking gun.”  It was a serendipitous discovery by mathematicians and IT experts. Indeed we may have the footprints of what the groups called a “massive fraud nationwide that went as deep and pervasive” up to the precinct level.

I once asked a mathematician just why he liked mathematics and he said because “it was beautiful.”  I mention this because of the 60-30-10 pattern prevailing during the election. It would be great as a fashionable textile print.

It had the 10 in narrow green, the 30 in medium red and the 60 in widest blue. (I would suggest to advocates of transparent elections to use the printed pattern as a self-evident slogan.)

In a press release distributed in the conference the groups said they found the “startling pattern towards the end of May 2013 when the 16 canvasses for the 2013 senatorial elections revealed a 60-30-10 linear pattern throughout the country.” At the time they were not yet sure what it meant but they continued studying and debating until it was found.

Eureka! – this was what happened during the elections. IT practitioners and professors of mathematics and bloggers debated, tore it apart and brought it together again into an inescapable conclusion: there was fraud and it was a pre-programmed fraud, It had nothing to do with counting votes automatically but with votes being made to fall into a pattern.

You don’t have to be a mathematical wizard to appreciate what the pattern demonstrated.

“60-30-10 meant that 60% of the voters chose candidates of the administration, 30% voted for the coalition of the opposition, and the remaining ten opted for the independent candidates.”

We may have finally found the secret behind the Smartmatic-PCOS automatic electoral system bought by the Comelec.

Nothing alarming if nine Team PNoy should win and three UNA candidates were winning. That was the result the SWS and Pulse Asia predicted.

The trouble was the results were uniform throughout the Philippines. 60-40-10. That was the give-away — divergences would show in a country like the Philippines with a fractious Filipino voting population and still come up with the same conclusion. But it was the manner of delivery that was alarming.

“For the first time in the history of Philippine elections the peoples’ votes appeared like a template, from Aparri to Jolo. The national pattern was also true at the regional level with most provinces showing the same behavior by the numbers.”

Adolfo Paglinawan, a political activist and convenor of the Solidarity for Sovereignty was the first to notice the unusual pattern.

He noticed while monitoring the incoming canvasses during the wee hours of the day after the elections, that the standings of the 33 senatorial candidates were showing what he called a “linear pattern much like a flatline” insofar as the standings of all the candidates, remaining substantially the same from the first canvass to the latest canvass on or about 3:45 am. He recorded that observation in an email to yahoo groups, and in flash it went viral.

The Paglinawan discovery was soon followed by former Comelec IT chief Ernie del Rosario who said the same thing – an unbelievable “60-30-10 distribution that he said appeared like a formula controlling the figures.”

Ateneo professor Lex Muga soon came out with 60-30-10 charts. It showed not just the prevalent application of the ratio to the 16 canvasses reaching the Comelec’s transparency server that was in the custody of the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV).

“In fact, by sheer batching,” Paglinawan said “a serious and glaring anomaly is already happening because the canvasses were not randomly being received by the Transparency Server but were being shortstopped somewhere, at the very least batched but as such already exposed to human manipulation.”

In the press conference called by the AES Watch, Paglinawan called the process an indication of an “insidious program defaulting the reception of raw canvass from the field, in favor of a pre-programmed 60-30-10 forward vote distribution relayed to the server.”

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“What we discovered was even more damning. In effect, it was a ‘smoking gun’ of deliberate and malicious programming of automated electoral returns using the 60-30-10 formula on precinct, municipal, and provincial levels,” said Hemenegildo Estrella.

“Our technical group has compiled chart illustrations of the cities and key municipalities across Mindanao, showing the votes a distribution of votes between Team PNoy and UNA that runs parallel to one another and do not intersect,” Estrella added.

Meanwhile, Tanggulang Demokrasya leads all other citizen groups in asking the courts and law enforcement agencies to act on the legal cases filed against various perpetrators in the 2010 and 2013 elections.

Tess Baltazar, Tandem chairman, says  that with the 60-30-10 ‘smoking gun’ “the automated output is as good as trash. It is impossible to reflect even a hint of the actual votes of the people.”