According to recent surveys, three out of every four Filipinos are satisfied with the Automated Election System (AES), which the Commission on Elections (Comelec) adopted on May 10.
Notwithstanding the protests filed by losing candidates, the stunning success of the AES is seen as helping to rehabilitate the image of the scandal-wracked Comelec.
The AES was made possible through the poll body’s partnership with the private consortium Smartmatic-TIM, which used the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) technology.
Although several PCOS machines acted up and caused delays in the voting at several precincts in certain parts of the country, misgivings about the AES quickly vanished as soon as election results began to be available within hours after the polls closed.
For the 2013 mid-term elections, the same AES has been proposed through the government’s outright purchase of Smartmatic-TIM’s PCOS machines. The arguments backing this proposal are sound and persuasive.
Buying the PCOS machines would, not only remove the need for another, expectedly contentious round of public biddings, it would also save government money and ensure that the 2013 elections, along with future polls, would be free from fraud and their results widely acceptable to the public.
The PCOS machines used last May were leased by Smartmatic TIM to the government for P7.2 billion by virtue of a contract that contains an option to purchase them for use in subsequent elections for P2 billion. The total bill for the purchase option would amount to a maximum of P5 billion, covering the machines and the automation technology services they require.
If the government were to opt for an entirely different technology, it would have to be ready to shell out at least P11 billion, which it already did for the last elections.
Critics of the purchase proposal claim that Smarmatic-TIM’s technology would already be obsolete by the time the next and other future elections come around.
To this, the consortium has responded with assurances that through its technology support services it would regularly update its software—primarily to prevent potential hackers and would-be cheats from tampering with the machines.
Besides saving billions of pesos by acquiring the PCOS machines, the government would also save on training costs for election personnel who have already been trained by Smartmatic-TIM. Despite the isolated incidents of foul-ups and glitches, the vast majority of these personnel were able to put their skills and training to good use last May.
Other detractors of the option to purchase the PCOS machines continue to harp on the legalistic angle.
The proponents, however, point out that no less than the Supreme Court has already upheld the validity of the Co-melec-Smartmatic TIM contract with the Comelec.
The high tribunal even took note of the report of the Special Bids and Awards Committee-Technical Working Group (SBAC-TWG), which pointed out that Smartmatic-TIM’s AES system and PCOS machines had passed “all end-to-end demo tests†using a set of 26 criteria, including an accuracy rating of at least 99.955 percent.
Where then does the persistent campaign to discredit the AES come from?
Sources in the information technology (IT) sector point out that the most vociferous group of detractors of Smartmatic-TIM and its PCOS machines consists of losing bidders in the Comelec’s AES project.
These self-styled “IT experts†have filed a graft complaint before the Office of the Ombudsman against Comelec officials and Smartmatic-TIM executives. They allege that many AES security features were abandoned or disabled during the elections to pave the way for widespread cheating.
They have been fueling the suspicion about a purported band of renegade Comelec-accredited technicians who had tampered with the election results by preprogramming the PCOS machines.
In fact, each and every one of the PCOS machines was under the joint control of the Comelec, Department of Science and Technology (DOST) and Smartmatic-TIM. The machines were only online for one to two minutes for the digital transmission of election results (ERs). They also adopted a security system similar to or even better than those used by banks for their Internet or ATM operations.
Soon after the May 10 elections Dennis Villorente, director of the DOST Advanced Science and Tech Institute, had testified before an inquiry called by the House Committee on Suffrage and Electoral Reforms chaired by then Makati Rep. Teodoro Locsin during the 14th Congress. According to Villorente, the PCOS machines garnered 100-percent accuracy in reading results during the pre-election tests done by the DOST.
In addition, Al Vitangol III, a certified hacking forensic investigator, said during the same House probe that vote-counting results were automatically saved in write-protected files in the Compact Flash (CF) cards and thus could not be tampered with.
Demonstrations during the House committee’s inspection of Smartmatic TIM’s plant in Ca-buyao, Laguna, showed that PCOS machines did not count additional transmissions of the same election results, that audit logs could not be tampered with because the machine that was tested did not start up when it was fed a CF card whose log had been edited and that efforts to delete a file or write a file on the protected backup CF card both failed.
In view of these findings, why are some “IT experts†still bent on tarnishing the integrity of the country’s first-ever automated elections?
It needs reiterating that the most vehement detractors of the AES are executives of IT firms that lost in the bidding for the project.
Need we say more?
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