Herman Tiu Laurel
11/26-12/2/2012
ON Sept. 11, 2012, in the State of Delaware, U.S.A. , Smartmatic International Corporation, (PCOS machines provider for Philippines' 2010 Elections) filed a Breach of Contract (Civil Action No. 7844-VCP) against its election technology supplier Dominion Voting Systems International Corporation (DVSI).
Smartmatic accused Dominion of failing to deliver fully functional technology for use in the 2010 Philippine national election; failing to provide timely technical support …; failing to place in escrow the required source code …; among others.
This means the Philippines paid P 7.1-B for deficient election technology and an admission that the "source code" was never deposited with the Bangko Sentral (BSP) (as the Election Automation Law, R.A. 9369 requires) but which Smarmatic and the Melo Comelec made the country believe was done – making them liars and criminals in the eyes of the law?
This also raises the questions of whether President Noynoy Aquino was duly elected President.
Source Code crux
In computer science the source code is the collection of computer instructions that the computer or PCOS machine can read and execute. CenPeg, Center for People Empowerment in Governance, a public policy center with U.P. and Ateneo IT scholars, was at the forefront of the crusade to check and test the Smarmatic source code.
The Election Automation Law (RA 8436) requires this source code to be available for examination. The Melo Comelec and Smartmatic insisted on tests only at their premises, using computers they specify and handled by their technician, and only for very short period. CenPeg refused to legitimize such "zarzuela" as serious testing requires extensive examination that IT experts say can take weeks or months to complete to confirm the viability of a source code.
In June 2010 representatives from Congress and political groups visited Smartmatic's Cabuyao plant to observe a PCOS demonstration. In the news then was the "Koala Boy" testimony alleging ER's (election returns) separately transmitted ahead of genuine ERs from precincts. Atty. Boy Imperial observed "… Smartmatic controls everything, …. they could have easily changed the programming of the machines beforehand, … While they had shown that the PCOS machines had refused to transmit an ER after an earlier ER has been transmitted, the allegations raised by Koala Boy could still be relevant…" For House committee chairman Rep. Teodoro Locsin, the plant and system inspection proved that the CF cards are tamper-proof; but it wasn't known then that the originally intended source code was not available and the ones in the demo are off unknown origin.
Locsin, for all his smartness, had been had.
Security lost
The absence of the original PCOS source code may explain why many security features were inoperable. The built-in Ultra Violet ballot authentication function did not work. Comelec rushed a P 30-M purchase of 80,000 hand held UV lamps most of which were never used. The "voter paper audit trail" or "receipt" print out to confirmation the PCOS's correct recording of the voters votes did not function, printing out only "congratulations". The required digital signature of the Board of Election Inspectors (BEI) members to authenticate transmission of election results was disabled and the Comelec, with the Supreme Court approval, substituted the PCOS "digital signature" which was none other than a machine number E-commerce legal experts declare are violating the E-commerce law.
The removal of PCOS security features is direct violation of the Automated Election System Law. Instead of allowing a delay in the elections and solving the glitches, the government, Comelec and Smartmatic presented the public with one fait accompli after another, sustained PR campaigns and stunts (like romantically linking Smartmatic spokesman with beauty queen), and paper over glaring legal issues. The cavalier regard for Law was likely motivated by pecuniary considerations from the P 7.1-B deal and dilemma of admitting the folly of dealing with Smartmatic, a mere "marketing" company which had no AES technology of its own. The Supreme Court denied Harry Roques's Concerned Citizen's Movement petition protesting the substitution of digital BEI inspectors signatures with the machine number.
Human Intervention
In its defense the Melo Comelec argued that "… the move was aimed at removing one step in the transmission process to minimize human intervention and protect the results of the balloting." Isn't the removal of all the security features "human intervention" by the Comelec, the Supreme Court? Likewise, Smartmatic by its deceit and cover-up on the matter of the non-submission of the "source code". The writing of the Automated Election System Law and inclusion of its PCOS security provisions was "human intervention" intended to safeguard the sanctity of the ballot, the railroading of the elections despite the request of the political opposition then for a week or so to fix the glitches was Comelec's intervention for derailing democracy.
International peace NGO The Carter Center observed the 2010 elections. Ingo Boltz, Austrian electronic election expert with the mission urged "caution in adopting automated voting", saying "The human element in traditional elections can often be its greatest asset…With a traditional ballot box, every layperson can, without the use of expert knowledge or tools, follow and verify every step of the election process…The price of automated voting is the delegation of these tasks to a handful of information technology experts and…it is basically impossible to guarantee that an e-vote system does exactly what its programmer says…We are obliged to trust that programmers are incorruptible." Are the software and PCOS machine providers (Smart vs. DVSI fighting over profits), Comelec, institutions like the Congress and Supreme Court incorruptible?
Annul 2010 Elections
On June 28, 2010 two days before the inauguration of Benigno "Noynoy" Aquinio III to the presidency at the Quirino grandstand, a group led by Atty. Homobono Adaza as counsel, with Mr. Ado Paglinawan, Herman Tiu Laurel et al, filed with the Supreme Court a petition for Certiorari and Prohibition against the Comelec and asking for the nullification of the 2010 presidential and local elections, GRL case No. 192561 on the grounds of illegal outsourcing of non-delegable power and functions to a foreign company in violation of the constitution and the Comelec and Smartmatic violations of various statutes including the Omnibus election code, the Automated elections Systems Law and the E-Commerce Act (on the illegality of the PCOS machine signature).
The petition concludes, "… a TRO or writ of preliminary injunction be issued against all officials who have been illegally and unconstitutionally proclaimed … Declaring the May 10, 2010 elections null and void, thus call for new elections …. ; Declaring all elective positions (including the President) which would be occupied by persons illegally proclaimed, vacant; As an alternative remedy, to order respondent COMELEC to conduct a manual count of all ballots in all precincts throughout the country in the presence of the public and representatives of candidates and political parties…
"Two and a half years later the Supreme Court has not responded. Atty. Bono Adaza asks, "If we are to believe in the full meaning of the Law and the evidence of massive automated election fraud, we should all those proclaimed winners in 2010 and Noynoy Aquino Hocus PCOS winners."
2013 PCOS Dilemma
Despite protests of the most competent automated election system watchdogs CenPeg, AES Watch and the Philippine Computer Society all composed of IT professional and university scholars, the Brillantes Comelec in March and the Supreme Court in June 2012 again approved the P 1.8-B purchase of the Smartmatic PCOS for the 2013 elections. Two months later the Smartmatic vs. Dominion case surfaced revealing Smartmatic's duplicity in claiming technology and source code for the PCOS. In an interview over DZMM last November 20 the anchor faced off Ado Paglinawan and Chairman Brillantes with the latter stammering to answer the issues and seeking to thresh them out in private. Fortunately, the anchor admonished the Comelec chair and demanded total public transparency on the issues.
The nation will be in widespread uproar over the "Hocus PCOS" situation soon, as responsible personalities of the Catholic Church have been roused to study the scandal seriously printing a thousand copies of the magazine Impact dedicated to reporting the irregularities in the PCOS of 2010. Thus far the issue has been kept out of the front pages of mainstream media, but it is only a matter of time before this explodes into a major national controversy.
Last November 21 the Joint Congressional Oversight Committee tackled only the allegations of overpricing of indelible ink in the 2012 ARMM Voter's Registration, and the Hocus PCOS issue with the new and unassailable evidence of Smartmatic and Comelec duplicity in the 2010 elections was not taken up. That's another delay in the investigation of Philippine Election's Scandal of the Century.
Smartmatic accused Dominion of failing to deliver fully functional technology for use in the 2010 Philippine national election; failing to provide timely technical support …; failing to place in escrow the required source code …; among others.
This means the Philippines paid P 7.1-B for deficient election technology and an admission that the "source code" was never deposited with the Bangko Sentral (BSP) (as the Election Automation Law, R.A. 9369 requires) but which Smarmatic and the Melo Comelec made the country believe was done – making them liars and criminals in the eyes of the law?
This also raises the questions of whether President Noynoy Aquino was duly elected President.
Source Code crux
In computer science the source code is the collection of computer instructions that the computer or PCOS machine can read and execute. CenPeg, Center for People Empowerment in Governance, a public policy center with U.P. and Ateneo IT scholars, was at the forefront of the crusade to check and test the Smarmatic source code.
The Election Automation Law (RA 8436) requires this source code to be available for examination. The Melo Comelec and Smartmatic insisted on tests only at their premises, using computers they specify and handled by their technician, and only for very short period. CenPeg refused to legitimize such "zarzuela" as serious testing requires extensive examination that IT experts say can take weeks or months to complete to confirm the viability of a source code.
In June 2010 representatives from Congress and political groups visited Smartmatic's Cabuyao plant to observe a PCOS demonstration. In the news then was the "Koala Boy" testimony alleging ER's (election returns) separately transmitted ahead of genuine ERs from precincts. Atty. Boy Imperial observed "… Smartmatic controls everything, …. they could have easily changed the programming of the machines beforehand, … While they had shown that the PCOS machines had refused to transmit an ER after an earlier ER has been transmitted, the allegations raised by Koala Boy could still be relevant…" For House committee chairman Rep. Teodoro Locsin, the plant and system inspection proved that the CF cards are tamper-proof; but it wasn't known then that the originally intended source code was not available and the ones in the demo are off unknown origin.
Locsin, for all his smartness, had been had.
Security lost
The absence of the original PCOS source code may explain why many security features were inoperable. The built-in Ultra Violet ballot authentication function did not work. Comelec rushed a P 30-M purchase of 80,000 hand held UV lamps most of which were never used. The "voter paper audit trail" or "receipt" print out to confirmation the PCOS's correct recording of the voters votes did not function, printing out only "congratulations". The required digital signature of the Board of Election Inspectors (BEI) members to authenticate transmission of election results was disabled and the Comelec, with the Supreme Court approval, substituted the PCOS "digital signature" which was none other than a machine number E-commerce legal experts declare are violating the E-commerce law.
The removal of PCOS security features is direct violation of the Automated Election System Law. Instead of allowing a delay in the elections and solving the glitches, the government, Comelec and Smartmatic presented the public with one fait accompli after another, sustained PR campaigns and stunts (like romantically linking Smartmatic spokesman with beauty queen), and paper over glaring legal issues. The cavalier regard for Law was likely motivated by pecuniary considerations from the P 7.1-B deal and dilemma of admitting the folly of dealing with Smartmatic, a mere "marketing" company which had no AES technology of its own. The Supreme Court denied Harry Roques's Concerned Citizen's Movement petition protesting the substitution of digital BEI inspectors signatures with the machine number.
Human Intervention
In its defense the Melo Comelec argued that "… the move was aimed at removing one step in the transmission process to minimize human intervention and protect the results of the balloting." Isn't the removal of all the security features "human intervention" by the Comelec, the Supreme Court? Likewise, Smartmatic by its deceit and cover-up on the matter of the non-submission of the "source code". The writing of the Automated Election System Law and inclusion of its PCOS security provisions was "human intervention" intended to safeguard the sanctity of the ballot, the railroading of the elections despite the request of the political opposition then for a week or so to fix the glitches was Comelec's intervention for derailing democracy.
International peace NGO The Carter Center observed the 2010 elections. Ingo Boltz, Austrian electronic election expert with the mission urged "caution in adopting automated voting", saying "The human element in traditional elections can often be its greatest asset…With a traditional ballot box, every layperson can, without the use of expert knowledge or tools, follow and verify every step of the election process…The price of automated voting is the delegation of these tasks to a handful of information technology experts and…it is basically impossible to guarantee that an e-vote system does exactly what its programmer says…We are obliged to trust that programmers are incorruptible." Are the software and PCOS machine providers (Smart vs. DVSI fighting over profits), Comelec, institutions like the Congress and Supreme Court incorruptible?
Annul 2010 Elections
On June 28, 2010 two days before the inauguration of Benigno "Noynoy" Aquinio III to the presidency at the Quirino grandstand, a group led by Atty. Homobono Adaza as counsel, with Mr. Ado Paglinawan, Herman Tiu Laurel et al, filed with the Supreme Court a petition for Certiorari and Prohibition against the Comelec and asking for the nullification of the 2010 presidential and local elections, GRL case No. 192561 on the grounds of illegal outsourcing of non-delegable power and functions to a foreign company in violation of the constitution and the Comelec and Smartmatic violations of various statutes including the Omnibus election code, the Automated elections Systems Law and the E-Commerce Act (on the illegality of the PCOS machine signature).
The petition concludes, "… a TRO or writ of preliminary injunction be issued against all officials who have been illegally and unconstitutionally proclaimed … Declaring the May 10, 2010 elections null and void, thus call for new elections …. ; Declaring all elective positions (including the President) which would be occupied by persons illegally proclaimed, vacant; As an alternative remedy, to order respondent COMELEC to conduct a manual count of all ballots in all precincts throughout the country in the presence of the public and representatives of candidates and political parties…
"Two and a half years later the Supreme Court has not responded. Atty. Bono Adaza asks, "If we are to believe in the full meaning of the Law and the evidence of massive automated election fraud, we should all those proclaimed winners in 2010 and Noynoy Aquino Hocus PCOS winners."
2013 PCOS Dilemma
Despite protests of the most competent automated election system watchdogs CenPeg, AES Watch and the Philippine Computer Society all composed of IT professional and university scholars, the Brillantes Comelec in March and the Supreme Court in June 2012 again approved the P 1.8-B purchase of the Smartmatic PCOS for the 2013 elections. Two months later the Smartmatic vs. Dominion case surfaced revealing Smartmatic's duplicity in claiming technology and source code for the PCOS. In an interview over DZMM last November 20 the anchor faced off Ado Paglinawan and Chairman Brillantes with the latter stammering to answer the issues and seeking to thresh them out in private. Fortunately, the anchor admonished the Comelec chair and demanded total public transparency on the issues.
The nation will be in widespread uproar over the "Hocus PCOS" situation soon, as responsible personalities of the Catholic Church have been roused to study the scandal seriously printing a thousand copies of the magazine Impact dedicated to reporting the irregularities in the PCOS of 2010. Thus far the issue has been kept out of the front pages of mainstream media, but it is only a matter of time before this explodes into a major national controversy.
Last November 21 the Joint Congressional Oversight Committee tackled only the allegations of overpricing of indelible ink in the 2012 ARMM Voter's Registration, and the Hocus PCOS issue with the new and unassailable evidence of Smartmatic and Comelec duplicity in the 2010 elections was not taken up. That's another delay in the investigation of Philippine Election's Scandal of the Century.
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