By Ducky Paredes
TWO entities – Automated Election System Watch (AES Watch), Citizens for Clean and Credible Elections (C3E) and Philippine Computer Society (PCS) -- are trying to stop us from holding our third peaceful and orderly computerized polls in 2016?
They tried to get rid of Comelec’s private partner Smartmatic and its AES/Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) by bullying Comelec to blacklist Smartmatic from the public auctions in preparation for the 2016 elections.
AES Watch and C3E want to bring back manual voting and counting in 2016 . They say that they want to prevent a repeat of what they say was the wholesale cheating that happened in 2019 and 2013.
Who wants to go back to the dagdag bawas elections that we had before the AES/PCOS?
The Comelec’s Bids and Awards Committee (BAC) issued a four-page resolution junking the blacklist-Smartmatic petition by C3E: “The said procurement process took place five years ago. This present BAC which was constituted for purposes of procuring goods and services in connection to the regular requirements of the Commission for the current year and for 2015 & 2016 electoral activities has no jurisdiction over the complaint at hand.”
Smartmatic’s Cesar Flores welcomes the BAC’s decision. He calls the petition, “nothing but a publicity stunt by groups who don’t want us to participate in the bidding and who are interested in bagging the lucrative contract for the PCOS machines.”
Flores says: “We are the largest service provider, and this scares the other companies. We won’t be discouraged. We have [a] good product. We have a good price. Competitors are afraid of that.”
Flores speculates that those against the AES/PCOS are “fronts for rival firms or groups who are desperately seeking to corner the P2-billion contract while posing as crusaders for clean and honest elections….Some of them selfishly want to offer their own technology.
Flores also says: “The Comelec is the largest PCOS user in the world.”
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Speaker Feliciano Belmonte Jr. says that returning to the manual system is impossible after the successful automation of the 2010 and 2013 polls. He calls on the Comelec to ignore the anti-AES groups that “are just making noise and looking for what’s most advantageous to them.”
Cagayan de Oro City Rep. Rufus Rodriguez was initially opposed to the use of PCOS machines in 2010 but had a change of heart after witnessing the accuracy of the units as a member of the House of Representatives Electoral Tribunal (HRET).
Ako Bicol Party-list Rep. Rodel Batocabe denounced the repeated and recycled claims of electoral fraud in the 2010 and 2013 polls, and points out that, “The worldwide trend is toward automation and we should not again go back to the jurassic age where the outcome of election results are known only after several weeks (or) even months.”
Valenzuela City Rep. Sherwin Gatchalian said that going back to manual balloting would be “like going back to the Dark Ages.”
Think tanks like the Stratbase Research Institute (SRI) and nongovernment organizations (NGOs) like Democracy Watch warn against the dire consequences of returning to the pre-automation electoral process.
An SRI paper notes: : “The speedy proclamation of winners, particularly for the presidency, have resulted in the restoration of legitimacy for the electoral process. The legitimization process was reinforced by the early concessions of the losing presidential candidates and the acceptance of the victory by Aquino.”
Entitled “Towards a Systematic Analysis of Automated Election in the Philippines: A Review of the 2010 and 2013 Elections,” the study was made amid allegations by automation critics that the 2013 elections were rigged to produce a “60:30:10” winning ratio for senatorial candidates.
Using election forensics and accepted statistical principles, the analyses of the study clearly debunked the critics’ claim of a systematic 60:30:10 winning ratio in the 2013 polls, in which the AES/PCOS system was supposedly programmed to come up with winners at a uniform proportion of 60% administration candidates, 30% from the opposition, and 10% independent bets.
Democracy Watch convenor Tim Abejo explains that the shift to AES has modernized the country’s electoral system as it replaced the manual way of voting and canvassing, which history has shown was prone to cheating: “It must be noted that the existing PCOS technology in Comelec’s inventory is the same one used in USA, Brazil, Venezuela, Belgium and India. More importantly, records show that hardware failure and replacement rate in the 2010 elections was only at 0.6%; and in the succeeding 2013 elections, it was even lower at approximately 0.5%.”
In fact, Comelec’s Brillantes is so confident that there was no incident of PCOS-instigated electoral hitch in the 2010 and 2013 polls that in one JCOC meeting, he had told critics that he would quit right then and there if they could present any proof of machine-related error in either of these computerized elections.
If these critics are true champions of electoral reforms and not just technology vendors in disguise, why have they for almost six years now been peddling a mongrel system featuring manual voting that–to quote legislators–will bring us back to the “dark ages” of dagdag-bawas, precinct-level cheating and poll violence?
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In a paid newspaper advertisement, C3E belittled Smartmatic as a mere “middleman/reseller” because its PCOS machines were manufactured by Jarltech while its software is owned by Dominion Voting Systems of Canada.
What’s wrong with that?
Apple Inc., the world’s No. 1 IT company renowned for its Mac computers and iPhone celfones, does not own a single factory anywhere in the world.
Apple iPhones are manufactured in factories of Foxconn.
Apple Inc. paid $21 million to the Swiss Federal Railways for using the Swiss Clock icon on its iPhone devices.
Microsoft now owns Nokia, and Samsung pays $10 to Microsoft for every android celfone Samsung sells. So what?
Smartmatic has secured licenses for AES and PCOs. Its subsidiary at the time of PCOS’ production was Jarltech, which is 51% owned by Smartmatic-TIM (SMTT). Jarltech leased the facilities of Qisda and hired manpower in China for the production.
This is standard practice. What is important here is that Smartmatic was–from start to finish–in control of the PCOS production, the supply chain, choosing and purchasing components and even in making modifications to the licensed technologies.
Another target of the critics’ assault was the option for Comelec to just extend the warranty or enter into a negotiated contract with Smartmatic on the maintenance or repair/refurbishing of the PCOS machines that were bought by the agency in 2013 (meaning, the same units that were leased in 2010), instead of securing such a service through public bidding.
A competitive bidding would open the 2016 balloting to greater technical risks of failure and delays, confusing assignment of responsibilities or liabilities, and greater security risks as the Comelec could end up with a new technology provider, instead of its tested-and-proven partner (Smartmatic) in 2010 and 2013.
Because of Smartmatic’s exclusivity agreement with its suppliers of PCOS parts, a rival firm that wins the bidding would have to resort to Reverse Engineering to manufacture their units, an act that could be considered illegal and in violation of IP rights.
As noted by Brillantes, the Comelec’s law department already issued a legal opinion that the agency could just exercise the extended warranty of Smartmatic if this firm can prove that it is the only one that can provide the necessary services to the 80,000-plus PCOS machines.
The Supreme Court decided in 2012 that the Comelec’s contract with Smartmatic was still alive, and that the warranty was still available. On top of this, there was the concurring opinion by no less than Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno that the warranty was still good for 10 years.
Section 50 of Republic Act No. 9184 or the procurement law allows for direct contracting when the procurement of Goods of propriety nature, which can be obtained only from the propriety source, i.e. when patents, trade secrets and copyrights prohibit others from manufacturing the same items.
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Leaders of the AES Watch and C3E should not be throwing stones at the Comelec and Smartmatic. Apparently, they also live in glass houses.
The president of the Philippine Accrediting Association of Schools, Colleges and Universities (PAASCU), Jesuit priest Joel Tabora filed criminal and administrative charges against Commission on Higher Education (CHED) charperson Patricia Licuanan and Leo Querubin, president of the Philippine sComputer Society (PCS), over an anomalous P10-million deal involving the creation of an accreditation unit to be called the PCS-Information Computing Accreditation Board (PICAB).
Tabora says the Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) signed by Licuanan and Querubin was disadvantageous to the government and violates both the anti-graft and procurement laws because PCS is not an accrediting agency.
The MOA ignored existing accrediting bodies under the Federation of Accrediting Agencies of the Philippines (FAAP) and gave unwarranted benefits to the PCS.
Querubin, like ousted Comelec commissioner Lagman, is one of the ring leaders of the groups demanding Smartmatic’s blacklisting from the Comelec’s public auctions, and was once general manager of Avante International Technology, Inc, which is a New Jersey-based company that was one of the losing bidders in the AES project.
PCS was once headed by Lagman, who had to deal with criminal charges before the Makati Regional Trial Court filed by the Department of Justice, based on a complaint lodged against him by former business colleague Nora Bitong.
The DOJ found probable cause to indict Lagman for estafa and criminal violations under the Corporation Code.
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The 2010 poll victory of the President as proof the accuracy of the PCOS/AES setup as well as the integrity and credibility of the balloting:;
Election lawyer Romulo Macalintal says “His (President Aquino) opponents did not contest his election when they all conceded defeat. None of them ever said that they were cheated by PCOS machines.”
Macalintal adds that all of the InfoTech experts crying fraud “miserably failed to show proof that any of the more than 80,000 PCOS machines was ever hacked or their results compromised.”
All election protests involving local posts have been dismissed because the losers failed to present any material discrepancy between the PCOS results and the results of the physical re-count of the ballots.
Thus, the best argument that the PCOS count in 2010 was accurate, says Macalintal, was that Interior and Local Government Secretary Manuel Rojas II has “not been actively pursuing” his election protest against Vice President Jejuna Binary that he filed before the Supreme Court in July 2010.
Had any of the election protests managed to prove massive PCOS cheating at the local level, Rojas would certainly have demanded the delivery of relevant ballot boxes in these contested areas to the SC for immediate recount.
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Readers who missed a column can access www.duckyparedes.com/blogs. This is updated daily. Your reactions are welcome at duckyparedes@gmail.com or you can send me a message through Twitter @diretsahan.
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