Report on poll fraud: plug gaps, or nix automation

SPORADIC cheating in the country’s first automated general elections last month appears to be confined to local races, the chairman of the House Committee on Suffrage and Electoral Reforms has concluded.

But these, taken with the “fitful credibility” with which technical provider Smartmatic-TIM explained crucial date-and-time stamp issues in the vote-counting machine, and the Commission on Elections’ move to discard certain security features, made it necessary to revisit the country’s experiment with automation—and perhaps even set it aside for the next elections if the loopholes of the May 10 exercise are not plugged.

These are among the highlights of a 47-page Chairman’s Report by PDP-Laban Rep. Teodoro Locsin Jr. of Makati City, whose panel conducted a 20-day investigation of “alleged fraud and Precinct Count Optical Scan [PCOS] machine manipulation in the May 10, 2010 polls,” on orders of the House of Representatives leadership.

In observing that manipulation was apparent in certain local races, Locsin’s report said, “The same cannot be said of the automated elections with regard to national positions because the hearings confined themselves to complaints from local candidates.” Still, he stressed, “it cannot be emphasized too strongly that a city, province or district deprived by a misused, which is to say a fraudulently conducted automated election, suffers the same political and social damage to the public interest in legitimate governance as an entire nation would endure from fraudulently elected national officials.”

Locsin said, “The further danger is that these admittedly sporadic automated or automation-related anomalies could be perpetrated and institutionalized nationwide by the unwise appointment of, say, an automated election cheat to government departments with nationwide reach involved in elections, such as DILG, DepEd, and DND, not to mention appointments to impending vacancies in the Commission on Elections and in the Advisory Council of the Automated Election Law.”

Based on the panel’s investigation which started on May 19, the method most likely adopted involves manipulation of time and date stamps, resetting the machines, refeeding already scanned or unused ballots and taking complete control of precincts.

In the report’s section on “observations, conclusion and recommendations,” Locsin said that while manipulation at the local levels, with any or several of the cited “strategies” appears to have been “laborious, fraught with risk of discovery, and time-consuming, the risk of discovery was mitigated by the certain knowledge that the media would dismiss the cheated candidate as a sore loser, forgetting the principle that while some losers cry cheated, some winners really cheated.”

During the investigation, almost all the complaining losing candidates who appeared and testified before the committee had similar complaints revolving around the gaps in dates and time that appeared in various election returns which had audit logs showing voting outside voting hours, none during voting hours, elections held before or after May 10, as well as transmissions at improbably late hours or even days after, where the count underwent sudden and radical reverses, whether the transmissions were electronically done or physical delivered and the alleged preprogramming of the compact flash (CF) cards, the report said.

“The cheating appears therefore to have been confined to local contests. While it is true that unused ballots are supposed to be torn in half, with the left side put in one envelope and the right in another, these folders are lost and not even most of the PCOS machines have been retrieved, let alone their CF cards, secrecy folders, pens, not to mention the huge ballot boxes themselves which remain in the custody of incumbent winners who are awaiting the rainy season to wash away the evidence,” said Locsin.

During the hearing, Smartmatic told the committee that it has the responsibility to retrieve the machines, but has no authority to return them to its plant for diagnostic testing.

This, Locsin learned, needs an authorization from the Comelec en banc, which he rued “might come when all interest in the matter has evaporated.”

According to Locsin, the explanation by Smartmatic-TIM, the Barbados-based lessor of 76,000 PCOS machines, of the time and date stamp variances “achieved only fitful credibility.”

He elaborated: “The explanations shifted from cavalier dismissals of the variances as trivial, to suddenly grave acknowledgment of their seriousness, marked in between by what Smartmatic tried to pass off as educated guesswork as to what might have gone wrong. Until all the PCOS are retrieved, stripped down, and eviscerated mechanically and the programs analyzed, we will never know why elections took place on the wrong days and at the wrong times according to documentation generated by the PCOS themselves.”

Locsin said that the time and date stamp issues “are too serious in all its aspects for the members of the committee to be convinced by explanations” that he described as sounding “like works in progress” at best.

“An election return that is dated other than the official day of elections must be taken at face value and is legally invalid. Voting logged as taking place hours after the close of voting hours, with ballots logged as having been fed to the voting machine at a fast and unvarying rate consistent only with one person doing it, are not just suspicious but invalid as well. It is no argument to say that when the time is wrong, the time is still right just because it is consistently wrong. Smartmatic tried to argue 12 hours of voting is still 12 hours of voting whenever and whatever the time logged or, for that matter, the date of the ER,” the legislator recalled, from testimonies in the hearings.

Locsin, one of the authors of Republic Act 9369 on poll automation, has also suggested—in light of the May 10 experience—the use of a hybrid ballot where the voter casts his vote by shading ovals, but with a part of the ballot where the voter could handwrite a word or phrase other than his or her name in lieu of the ballots used during the May 10 polls. He was alluding to allegations of preshading of the ovals and refeeding to the machine in some of the disputed areas.

Locsin suggested that before the next automated election, “all the loopholes in the PCOS and the automated election process should be firmly plugged by either the current provider or by another more assiduous supplier.”

Otherwise, he said, “a reversion to manual elections with heightened vigilance by organizations like the PPCRV and Namfrel would probably yield more credible and accurate results.”

He quoted the Comelec’s executive director Jose Tolentino, who said, “The problem is not automation but the people running the automation,” which is to say, Locsin said, “the same people whose perennial and persistent misconduct of manual elections prompted the conversion to automation in the first place.”

He then added: “Guns really don’t shoot people, people shoot people. Machines don’t cheat, people do. Unfortunately, the same people are still running Comelec despite periodic changes of commissioners over the years and the leadership of well-meaning chairmen such as the incumbent,” Locsin added.

It was Tolentino who on his own issued the controversial order, described by Locsin as “curious” because it was unnecessary, to deploy 20 blank extra CF cards per province, along with two  (card) burners, on the “unlikely contingency of yet another wrong configuration,” even though the Smartmatic-TIM had claimed it corrected all the 76,000 wrongly configured CF cards several days before the polls.

The curious deployment of 20 blank cards and two burners per province is “too few to make a difference in a crisis of the national magnitude of the wrongly configured cards [corrected already before the polls] but enough to make a difference in the outcome of the local elections at the hands of unscrupulous election officials on the ground.”

Locsin noted that Rep. Rufus Rodriguez had assailed the “illegality of a contingency measure that was ordered before it was authorized by the Comelec en banc,” and that the head of the Advisory Council, “the forthright and uncompromising” Ray Anthony Roxas-Chua, expressed serious alarm over the matter.

It was plain providential, Locsin hinted, that President-elect Noynoy Aquino’s lead was so huge as to crush any challenge—meaning he would have won in an election that is manual, manual with cheating, automated, automated with cheating. But the manipulation of the local races is cause for alarm, he said.  –Fernan Marasigan / Reporter, Businessmirror