Sunday, May 9, 2010

It’s All Over But the Cheating

NEWSFLASH
By Perry Diaz

The campaign period has just ended and the two-day no-campaigning weekend has begun. To the nine contenders for president, it would be the longest sleepless weekend in their lives. Indeed, they all have reasons to be apprehensive of how the first automated election system (AES) in the country would turn out.

With the uproar over the malfunctioning of the Precinct Count Optical Scanner (PCOS) machines two days ago, the specter of a failure of elections looms. Talks of a NO-EL (no election) scenario, Oplan Rafael (Retain Arroyo through Failure of Elections), and Project Full Moon abounded. The military was placed on “red alert,” ready to quell any public disturbances.

Calls for postponement of the May 10 elections were heard from all sectors including President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s legal counsel, an act which cost him his job the following day. The Supreme Court was petitioned to allow the postponement of the elections. The high court swiftly rejected it.

And two days after the testing fiasco occurred, the AES contractor — Smartmatic-TIM — informed the Commission on Elections (Comelec) that the glitch has been corrected and they’ll send the replacements for the 76,000 corrupted Compact Flash (CF) cards. And earlier today, Comelec announced that re-tests were conducted in three precincts — yes, three precincts! — and certified that they’re now working. What about the other 75,997 PCOS machines? Aren’t they going to test them to see if they work, too?

Now, the Herculean task of delivering and installing the new CF cards in 76,000 PCOS machines scattered throughout the 7,000-island archipelago begins and must be operational in the wee hours of May 10 in time for the polls to open at 8am. Doable? With no contingency plan in place, it better be doable. Otherwise, it’s going to be chaos.

Automated dagdag-bawas

With the recent poll surveys showing Noynoy Aquino pulling ahead by as much as 20% over his closest opponent, Erap Estrada, the presidential election is over… but the cheating. Indeed, the talk now is if administration candidate Gilbert “Gibo” Teodoro — whose rating is an anemic 9% — would be able to catch up with Noynoy and beat him! The answer to that is “automated dagdag-bawas” (add-subtract). Actually, that’s what happened when the glitch was discovered during the tests conducted in Occidental Mindoro and Muntinglupa City. The tests showed that votes for Noynoy and Many Villar were subtracted (bawas) from them and added (dagdag) to Gibo. Yup, that was how dagdag-bawas works. The big difference is: with AES, cheating is done electronically without paper trail.

The following article written by Ike Seneres tells of a new cheating system:

“As the controversy over the CF cards is heating up, a new theory has emerged, bringing out a new threat to the democratic voting process that is more vicious than the other threats. Yesterday, I received another call from a concerned citizen who informed me that he has reliable information from a COMELEC insider who could no longer hold back his conscience about a system of cheating that will completely change the outcome of the election, not unless it is exposed and stopped on its track.

“Several months back, I wrote an article about twenty possible ways of cheating in the automated system of elections. I wrote that one way is to print invisible marks in the ballot itself, marks that could issue instructions to the PCOS machine, as to what to count and what not to count. What I wrote was technologically sound, because it is doable within the Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) technology.

“According to my informant, some operators within the COMELEC have already succeeded in pre-programming the PCOS machines so that it will prioritize the reading (the recognition) of pre-determined invisible marks, instead of the visible optical marks. In technical terms, this has something to do with data protocol, meaning that the optical mark reader will read first (or read only) the invisible marks. In layman terms, what this means is that the machine will count the votes in favor of the pre-determined candidates as chosen by the insider operators, regardless of what the voter will shade.

“As a writer and as a columnist, it is not my place to say that there will be cheating in the election. All I could say within my sphere of responsibility, within the reach of my technical know-how is that the system is vulnerable, meaning that cheating could happen if anyone wants to cheat. As far as I know, the old operators are still lurking within the COMELEC, even if the system of voting is already new.

“In what appears to be an anti-climactic move, the COMELEC decided to remove several security features that would have protected the sanctity of the ballot as it was originally intended. One of these features is the built-in capability of the PCOS to automatically read ballots that do not have the proprietary ultra violet (UV) marks. This would have screened out fake ballots in the first place.”

Who benefits from automated dagdag-bawas?

With Mr. Seneres’ expose, the question is: who is the presidential candidate who would benefit from“automated dagdag-bawas”? By process of elimination, it couldn’t be Noynoy or Erap or any of the tailenders. It has to be either Gibo Teodoro or Manny Villar. They’re both considered as Gloria’s candidates — Teodoro is her anointed candidate while Villar — or “Villarroyo” — is her secret candidate. However, if the glitch discovered in Occidental Mindoro and Muntinglupa City is an indicator of who was programmed in the CF cards to benefit from the “automated dagdag-bawas” cheating operation, then it’s going to be Teodoro, not Villar.

Since the “corrected” 76,000 CF cards — except for three — would be installed without testing, how can the “cheating” that Mr. Seneres exposed be prevented? And if Teodoro has to beat Noynoy, 13 million votes have to be added (dagdag) to Teodoro to give him at total of 35 million votes and 13 million subtracted (bawas)from Noynoy to bring his total down to 29 million votes. Indeed, as the expression goes, “the fix is in.”

If the presidential election is rigged to deny frontrunner Noynoy victory and make his cousin Gibo the winner, it could ignite mass unrest which could then lead to a “people power” uprising. Consequently, Gloria would be forced to declare a state of emergency or martial law. And when that happens, all hell will break loose.

Déjà vu.

(PerryDiaz@gmail.com)

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