House probe Chairman Locsin finds no evidence of PCOS machine, card fraud

AS far as Rep. Teodoro Locsin Jr. of Makati is concerned—and his feeling, attitude and findings during the hearings of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Suffrage and Electoral Reforms seem to be shared by most Filipinos—there is no evidence that fraud has been committed with the use of the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines or the memory cards for the machines.

Congressman Locsin has a personal stake in the correctness, honesty and impregnability to fraud of the Smarmatic-TIM’s automated election system (AES) that the Commission on Elections (Comelec) bought.
For as chairman of his committee he had become directly involved in vetting the various offered systems.
After he had examined the Smartmatic-TIM offer, and asked them questions and received answers that satisfied his scrutiny, he became an enthusiastic promoter of the AES. That is why once or twice, he exploded against the Smartmatic officers when they seemed to have betrayed him by going back on guarantees they had given him about the machines and the system.

As it turned out, the time-stamp that became one of the big issues against the PCOS machines, were not vitally important. Some other way of determining the correctness or falsity of the process was built in to make up for the safety feature lost when the time-stamp did not reflect the real time.

From all over the country hundreds, maybe thousand of reports from mainly losing voters claimed that some fraud had been committed involving the machines, the memory cards (some of which wee mysteriously thrown into a garbage bin), the insertion of ballots into the machines, etcetera.

The most dramatic of these allegations were those presented in a video of a masked man, named “the Koala bear” by Representative Locsin. He alleged that he and his team were able to manipulate the transmission of false election results to the Comelec centers and thus made it possible for losing candidates to win and overwhelm their opponents. It was electronic dagdag bawas and “electronic Garci,” the “whistleblowers” claimed.

This was how, these shadowy whistleblowers claimed, Mayor Jejomar Binay of Makati, who has been proclaimed vice-president-elect, bested Sen. Manuel “Mar” Roxas 2nd. They even claimed that for the P1.7-billion fee Binay had paid their team, they also added votes to those actually received by Noynoy Aquino.

But none of them, not the “Koala bear” (koalas are actually marsupials not bears), not the front men who called media to tell the fraud stories, not some congressmen and a congresswoman who presented “proofs”—memory cards, videos shot through a window—could back their stories with actual evidence.
The “Koala bear” never identified himself.  The others who said they had proofs could not coherently show where these pieces of evidenced were.

It became quite clear that the Smartmatic-TIM guaranteed that any intrusion into the PCOS machine would not work. Feeding the machine with a wrong memory card would only make it hang. Feeding the machine with ballots that did not have the security marks would also make it spit the ballot out.

Smartmatic called on on IT experts to feed their memory cards and mess with the PCOS machines in the firm’s secured Cabuyao warehouse. No one took the dare. They said the PCOS machine to be tested must be in a neutral location.  But to do that would need to replicate the setup in Cabuyao or the Comelec.

The only conclusion that Locsin and most of the members of his committee could make is that the good people—including congressman Ace Barbers and PCSO Director Manoling Morato—who were approached by people who claimed to be Comelec officers who knew how to rig the AES and the machines and cards it used, is that they were talking to con men.

Still, even Locsin—while clearing the machines and their Smartmatic creators – could not quite discount the possibility that if some fraud did happened, it must have been done by people in the Comelec.

For some Comelec people had access to everything that Smartmatic people had.

Now everyone still interested in the subject is waiting for the official report of the Locsin committee. It will most likely say everything went fine with Smartmatic and the world outside the Comelec. But within the Comelec? –Manila Times