The moment of truth for the PCOS machines!

It’s the 33rd death anniversary of my father, Atty. Jesus “Lindong” Avila who died at a young age of 59. Of his five children, three of us have already gone past the age of 60, thanks to new medicines. My father died of aneurism, which could have been prevented, but then God had other plans for him. May we request the pious reader or those who still remember him to pray for the repose of his soul.

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Very few journalists dare write about the discrepancies that came out of the first automated elections that we used last May 2010, where the Commission on Elections (Comelec) tapped Smartmatic and its Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) for the electronic vote count. But as you already know, today, we still have no clear winner in the Vice-Presidential race until the Electoral Tribunal makes a final decision on this issue. Also, as we learned during the last US elections, which is also automated, the results of that election was out in less than 24-hours. It took more than 3 days to determine who won in the Presidential race in the last elections in 2010. So what happened?

Well today, there is a Catholic Media Network Forum of the Catholic Bishop’s Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) that will present the groups headed by the Tanggulang Demokrasya, AES Watch, and the Center for People Empowerment in Government (CENPEG) who will answer all the questions that media would pose about the implementation of the Automated Election System. If you ask me, it should have been the Comelec or Smartmatic who should have done this after the May 2010 elections. But these people do not know what transparency is all about.

Just yesterday, I got a report written by Roberto Verzola years ago entitled “The Discrepancies found by the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV): Tip of the Iceberg?” Allow me to reprint that portion for your better understanding.

“News reports say the PPCRV has received 70,255 and encoded 43,035 election returns (ERs). Out of these, they found 29 discrepancies, or an average of one in 1,484 ERs (.07% error rate). PPCRV chair Henrietta de Villa was quoted saying, “We can say that the election is clean because the discrepancy is very minimal.” Unfortunately, computers are not evaluated that way. If your spreadsheet program makes one error for every 1,484 cells, junk it at once because it is useless! If your wordprocessor changes one of every 1,484 characters it processes, junk it too!

While the analog side of an automated system (such as the scanning of marks) may introduce errors, we expect from the digital side zero error. Even a single error in a million characters or operations is a cause for worry, because it suggests a bug (a problem) in the machine’s logic. When testing software, testers assume that if you find one bug, more hidden bugs must exist. Unless that bug is found and properly evaluated, we can’t say if the problems it can cause are minor or major. All we know is, something is wrong with the software. Unless the 29 discrepancies have been traced to the particular portion of Smartmatic software that cause them, and other portions of the software have been searched for similar bugs, it is premature to declare the election “clean.”

Clearly when PPCRV Chair Henrietta de Villa declared the May 2010 elections as clean because the discrepancies are “minimal” she was talking from a layman’s point of view as she is not a computer expert. This is why many of us suspected the PPCRV Chair to be in cahoots with Comelec and Smartmatic in fooling the voters during Election Day as her words gave legitimacy to the May 2010 elections.

Without any doubt, the Comelec did its best to hide these discrepancies from the Filipino voter lest the elections were declared as null and void. But just like smoke… no matter how you try to cover it up or contain it, some smoke gets away for people to see. One of the most telltale signs were the news report we got right after the May 10th elections when news reporters got hold of a PCOS machine in Cagayan de Oro and another in Antipolo that was sending signals to we don’t know where.

Until today after numerous columns asking who owned those confiscated PCOS machines, we didn’t get any reply from the Comelec nor from Smartmatic. A year ago, I also learned that right here in Cebu, a friend of mine admitted to me that he had a PCOS machine right in his own home. So again we ask… “Why did certain private individuals had a PCOS machine in their possession?” No one has answered these questions up to this time. So do we trust the PCOS machines? No sir! To be totally honest to you, I don’t even trust the Comelec officials who are clearly beholden to Pres. Benigno “PNoy” Aquino, III instead of being beholden to the Filipino people.

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