Sixto, don’t throw good money after bad PCOS

Comelec chief Sixto Brillantes is rushing a staggering P7 billion for the supplier-repairer of 43,000 new and 86,000 old voting machines. He wants it paid out by Dec. 4, even if retiring with two other commissioners on Feb. 2. It must be the “commissioner” role. They are favoring the shady Venezuelan Smartmatic Corp.

The firm had fooled the government into believing it is the developer-software owner of the precinct count optical scanners (PCOS). That was a serious breach of the Automated Election Law, which guided the 2010 and 2013 balloting. To date the government has paid more than P13 billion to Smartmatic for the erratic PCOS, its add-ons, and storage.

In 2010 and 2013 Smartmatic failed to give the PCOS source code for review, precisely because it is a mere dealer, not developer-owner. Its PCOS dry runs had flopped. Prescribed security features were taken out, like the precinct inspectors’ exclusivity to run the machines, vote verification, and non-rewritable compact flash drives. In 2013 the PCOS never completed the ballot counting and national tally canvassing. Transmission bogged down. Senatorial results showed an odd 60-30-10-percent trend for administration-opposition-independent candidates. No random manual audit followed.

In sum, the Comelec has thrown a good P13 billion to Smartmatic. And it is throwing P7 billion for more of the bad PCOS.

Sixto insists on it because supposedly required by the automation law. He claims so as a lawyer, and smirks at info-technologists who dare debate him about his field of expertise. He also sneers at their calls for manual balloting and counting at precincts, with automation only of canvassing and transmission. Affecting superiority over them in their field of expertise, he imagines their idea to restore cheating at precincts and set back the results by days.

Sixto is wrong on both law and info-technology.

The way the Election Automation Law is worded, say true legal experts, it is directory rather than obligatory. Meaning, it instructs the Comelec not to blindly, fully automate all phases of the election, but to adopt a system most appropriate for the country. It is Sixto who displays ignorance of the law by favoring a supplier that has broken it many times over.

Manual balloting and counting will not take long if reverted to the old precincts instead of the present clusters. A precinct has at most 200 voters: housemates, kinsmen, neighbors. A cluster has 600 to 1,000, likely including strangers in the sitio or subdivision. It is faster to make 200 voters cast ballots from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., than for three to five times the number. After that, the precinct inspectors can snack, then count the 200 ballots in a jiffy.

Additionally, modern gadgets can be used to foil fraud. CCTV cameras can be perched atop the precinct count, so party watchers and voters can witness any switching, misreading, or miscounting. Voters will be assured that their ballots are counted.

By 7 to 9 p.m., the precinct counts would have finished. Tally forms can then be scanned onto computer tablets, and transmitted to municipal, district, city, provincial, and national canvassing centers. Like in 2013 telcos can pinpoint and ensure the wifi coverage of all far-flung villages. Full results can be in and broadcast by midnight. With proper checks, there can be no chance of dagdag-bawas (vote padding-shaving).

Info-techies estimate this manual-automated hybrid to cost only P600 million to P1 billion – not P7 billion. Ballots are of newsprint, not cardboard with special pens. The gadgets can be procured from ordinary tech stores in major cities – not a single lying Smartmatic. No need for warehousing, for the gadgets can be resold to bargain hunters or donated to public schoolchildren.

Most of all, no more kickbacks.

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Fifty-eight persons were massacred five years ago last Sunday in Maguindanao, where the Ampatuan political clan then reigned.

Their bodies were unearthed from a pit into which a backhoe had pushed and buried them. They were kinswomen of the Ampatuans’ rival Mangudadatu clan, lawyers, passing motorists, and 34 newsmen. Spent bullet shells, machetes, and the backhoe were recovered at the scene; the slugs removed from the bodies; and the murder rifles traced to the Ampatuans and their private army. Witnesses fingered the masterminds: governor-patriarch Andal Ampatuan Sr. against whom a Mangudadatu was running in the 2010 election, sons Andal Jr. and Zaldy, cousins, and nephews. Motive: prevent Mangudadatu’s wife, two sisters, and lawyers from filing his candidacy at the provincial capitols, and the newsmen from witnessing it; hence, their abduction en route, in Ampatuan town, aided by crooked policemen and abetted by crooked Army officers. There are taped conversations and text messages of the illegal detention.

Bribery, coercion, and forgetting are the only way out of the odious crime. Money has changed hands, with the confessed backhoe driver the latest to be tempted to shut up. At least three witnesses have been killed, their families cowed into silence. No less than Malacañang is leading the forgetting, in promoting the officers who aided and abetted the massacrers. All these guarantee a repeat of the crime – soon.

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