Sunday, 11 April 2010 00:00
BY SAMMY MARTIN REPORTER
AN Information Technology (IT) expert over the weekend expressed fears that insiders in the Commission on Elections (Comelec) might ruin or influence the results of the first automated elections in the country. Professor Roberto Verzola said that questions unanswered on the credibility of the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machine should be address at once by Comelec officials to erase doubts that the results of the elections is
questionable.
He said that “the automated elections system [AES] had a 25 percent chance of success because of the disquieting signs that are making it easier for insiders to change the results of the elections.”
Verzola, the secretary general of election watchdog, Halalang Marangal told newsmen at the weekly forum, Kapihan sa Sulo that “those who got away with fraud in earlier elections were never punished so they are bound to find ways to cheat under the automated elections too.”
He warned that the security features of the AES were being stripped away one by one, making the job of cheats easier.
Among those he mentioned were the change in the ballot box design from transparent to dark, making the insides less visible; the disabling of PCOS ultraviolet scanner, which usually detects fake ballots; the earlier missing National Printing Office mark in Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao ballots and the Comelec instructions to Board of Election Inspectors members not to use digital signatures when transmitting precinct results, aside from the assignment of the digital signature generation and certification functions to Smartmatic instead of an independent third party.
Versola also hit the Comelec for “keeping PCOS error rates by taking away the four opportunities by the voting public to determine PCOS scanning and counting accuracy.”
He said these four were:
· The acceptance testing of the PCOS by Comelec, the result of which is not available to the public.
· The system audit and source code review by the US certification firm Systest Labs, whose certification documents and report have also remained confidential.
· On election day itself, the system for voters to verify if their choices were correctly registered by the PCOS, which was establish by the Comelec.
· A random manual audit to double check if PCOS counts agree with the actual votes as determined manually by an audit team, which the Comelec wants done only after the winners are proclaimed.
“It just giving you the life vest even you know that the plane or ship you are riding is safe. In case there is problem, which has the last card to save your precious life,” Versola explained.
He added that without the four opportunities to determine for ourselves how accurate the PCOS are, “we will never have a good idea of their error rates.”
He pointed out that public knowledge about individual PCOS rates is essential because if the error rate is high as the percentage winning margin or higher, the election outcome will be indeterminate and we will again find ourselves in political limbo.
However, he said, if insiders secretly knows which election equipment are ok and not ok, they can selectively assign these by region or province to cause problems in targeted areas.
The professor also noted the Comelec policy of drastically reducing the grounds for pre-proclamation protest to only two—illegal composition or illegal proceedings of the board of canvassers.
He called policy “proclaim first, deal with protest later,” regardless of “the fraud which might have occurred during the voting, counting results by machines whose are not known.”
· A random manual audit to double check if PCOS counts agree with the actual votes as determined manually by an audit team, which the Comelec wants done only after the winners are proclaimed.
“It just giving you the life vest even you know that the plane or ship you are riding is safe. In case there is problem, which has the last card to save your precious life,” Versola explained.
He added that without the four opportunities to determine for ourselves how accurate the PCOS are, “we will never have a good idea of their error rates.”
He pointed out that public knowledge about individual PCOS rates is essential because if the error rate is high as the percentage winning margin or higher, the election outcome will be indeterminate and we will again find ourselves in political limbo.
However, he said, if insiders secretly knows which election equipment are ok and not ok, they can selectively assign these by region or province to cause problems in targeted areas.
The professor also noted the Comelec policy of drastically reducing the grounds for pre-proclamation protest to only two—illegal composition or illegal proceedings of the board of canvassers.
He called policy “proclaim first, deal with protest later,” regardless of “the fraud which might have occurred during the voting, counting results by machines whose are not known.”
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