P1B paid to ensure victory for presidential bet—lawyer

Appearing before the hearing of the House committee on suffrage and electoral reforms, former Assemblyman Homobono Adaza yesterday bared that a cabal of seven persons, four of whom are regional directors of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) and who are in control of at least 14 out the 17 regions in the country, have connived to rig the May 10 polls in favor of an unnamed presidential candidate in exchange for a cool P1 billion.

In his testimony at the resumption of the hearing of the committee headed by Makati Rep. Teddyboy Locsin, Adaza said the group of seven allegedly offered a national candidate to manipulate the election results in his favor for a fee of P1 billion, claiming that the group has control of 14 regions.

Adaza said the group claims it has in its possession CF cards which could be programmed to suit the needs of any candidate.

The former lawmaker said the national candidate allegedly bit the offer.

Quoting his source, Adaza said “one national candidate allegedly accepted the offer. They made the rounds of the national candidates, one of the candidates supposedly bought the deal,” Adaza said.

When the solons asked Adaza who the Comelec officers were, the former lawmaker requested an executive session which the committee granted.

At the resumption of the hearing, Ronald Tan, a defeated vice mayoralty candidate of Tagaytay City, told the committee that three days before the May 10 elections, Comelec officials and employees from two departments approached him and his partymates offering 10 preprogrammed CF cards for P5 million.

Tan said they were told that these cards specified to specific clustered precincts.

“They thought we would give in to their demand. They told us in no uncertain terms that it is easier to cheat in this automated election because it is all automatic. We of course rebuked them telling them that how could that be when all the source codes, all the pin codes are supposed to be secured. And in an almost arrogant laughter, they told us all of these things have already been designed,” Tan told the committee.

Interestingly, Tan said his political opponents in the city led by the incumbent mayor has been bragging and assuring his associates that he had purchased three Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines, official ballots and even 18 cartons of indelible ink and that “there is no way for anyone to beat them because the number of votes have already been predetermined.”

Yesterday’s testimonies corroborate the testimony on Monday of Surigao del Norte Gov. Robert Ace Barbers who bared he was approached by a “decent looking man” on November 2009 in a golf course and offered his “services” that would guarantee his victory and his entire slate in the province.

Also at yesterday’s hearing, Abakada-Guro party-list Rep. Jonathan de la Cruz submitted a report about the malicious codes in the systems of the PCOS “to emphasize the point that the PCOS machines and the CF cards that were transposed within a period of four days before elections could actually do all the things that were earlier alleged by those who have come out in the open.”

De la Cruz said as he read the statement of Halalang Marangal prepared by IT expert Roberto Verzola regarding the discrepancies found by the Parish Pastoral Council on Responsible Voting (PPCRV) dated May 22.

On said date, the PPCRV received 70,255 Election Returns and encoded 43,025 ERs and out of this, it found 29 discrepancies or an average in 1, 484 ERs which is a 0.7 percent error rate.

“PPCRV chairman Henrietta de Villa was quoted as saying that 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 word processor makes 1 error of 1,484 counts junk it too. 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, Halal warns that it is premature to declare the elections clean,” De la Cruz said.

Dennis Villorente of the Department of Science and Technology and chairman of the technical evaluation committee of the Comelec admitted that this actually happens and there are more than 29 discrepancies, but said that it can be corrected.

De la Cruz told the panel that this is something that it should look into.

“Here’s a proof that the PCOS machines does bring something but transmits something else and this called malicious code that if it exist in one part of the system, the other part of the system may also contains malicious codes,” De la Cruz said.

Malicious code also known as vandals is a new breed of Internet threat that cannot be efficiently controlled by conventional antivirus software alone. Unlike viruses, that require a user to execute a program in order to cause damage, vandals are auto-executable applications.

Once inside the network or workstation malicious code can enter network drives and propagate. They can also cause network and mail server overload by sending email messages, stealing data and passwords, deleting document files, email files or passwords, and even re-formatting hard drives.

When grilled by an IT expert, Villorente failed to satisfactory answers on issues concerning the files inside the CF cards.

Al Vitangcol, Computer Hacking Forensic Investigator and co-convenor of Compact for Free and a Democratic Elections asked Villorente where would the actual result of the elections be or in what file.Vitangcol, actually is asking for a certain file called res trans. He admitted he didn’t know.

When Vitangcol asked Villorente about the file in the CF card that contains the actual result, the latter said he could not provide the exact file name except mentioning about a second partition in the CF card. “What is the content of the second partition?” asked Vitangcol. Villorente told the panel that Smartmatic can answer the query.

This prompted Vitangcol to ask the panel to compel Villorente to answer the query.

To this, Villorente said: “As I have mentioned your honor I do not know the exact file name. I already mentioned that for the electronically uploaded file is the file name res transfile but for the printed ERs it’s a different file but I don’t know the exact file name.”

When Villorente insisted that Smartmatic should be made to answer the question, Vitangcol retorted, “I believe you said that you are a member of the technical evaluation committee how can you evaluate something that you do not know?”

Meanwhile, Bayan Muna party list Rep. Teddy Casiño, claiming that Smartmatic-generated digital signatures built into the PCOS machines failed to serve the purpose of securing the data sent by the Comelec’s board of election inspectors, called for an expanded random manual audit covering 10 percent of all clustered precints.

“It is misleading for Smartmatic and the Comelec to say that their built-in digital signatures complies with the requirements of the law. Letting Smartmatic assign these built-in signatures to the board of election inspectors (BEIs) is like letting a bank assign the PIN codes for its ATM clients, or letting an internet provider assign the email passwords of its customers. It is like letting someone else write your signature,” said Casiño.

He said that for a digital signature to be effective and secure, it is the user, in this case the BEI, that should generate his own unique code. “Otherwise, someone in Smartmatic can hack into the system and send tampered election returns using their own assigned digital signatures.”

In a related development, the Interior secretary said that the government is not keen on launching a formal investigation the vote-rigging allegations patterned after the similar incidents recorded back in the 2004 national elections, saying it would just dignify the so-called “enterprising idiots” who are suspected to have orchestrated such ‘crude attempts’ to discredit this year’s automated elections.

Given the obvious reluctance of the accusers to present substantial evidence to support their allegations, Interior and Local Government Secretary Ronaldo Puno said the government would no longer pursue a large-scale probe to these people so as not to put any impression to the public that such claims may be credible.

Puno explained that by far they are already convinced that all these accusations of fraud manifested by the presence of ‘Koala bear’, the masked whistleblower who claimed of shaving some of the votes intended for the losing candidates, as well as that of the ‘Hello Nico’ controversy from which his name has been dragged, are all part of some trick to incite more doubts on the credibility the recent electoral proceedings coming into the first day of canvassing of votes for the president and vice president by the joint Houses of Congress. –Charlie V. Manalo with Aytch S. de la Cruz, Daily Tribune