Law of Large Numbskulls

DIE HARD III

Herman Tiu Laurel

5/29/2013

Daily Tribune

I don't look into the details of the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) election shenanigans anymore, but I'm glad others like the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) Watch, US based Filipino journalist Ado Paglinawan, the Philippine Computer Society and many others are still scrutinizing the minute details of Comelec and Brillantes' transgressions.

I had long concluded that Philippine elections are circuses when they used the Smartmatic-Comelec PCOS or any other electronic or automated system at the precinct level designed to manipulate votes, and when the Philippine Supreme Court continues to protect the Comelec-PCOS shenanigans such as violating the rule of prompt court action by sitting for three years on the petition lawyer Bono Adaza, myself and Ado Paglinawan filed in June of 2010 calling for the nullification of the 2010 Elections on the basis of the Comelec and the election exercise's proven violations of the Automated Election Law.

An ongoing debate rages between a small minority who are still defending the PCOS and a much larger number of the knowledgeable IT experts in the country from the major academic institution, i.e. the UP and the Ateneo, and journalist Ado Paglinawan, who have exposed the statistically unbelievable 60-30-10 apparent template in the "batched" canvassing of the votes from the different provinces. This "batching" of the national canvassing is the first time ever in Philippine election history. In the past the canvassing from the provinces were done and announced as they came in from the field. Why this "batching" was done may be explained in the discussion I will cite below. Suffice it to say that the pattern from the first to the sixteenth batched canvass showed the controversial 60-30-10 pattern and then the canvass flow stopped at around 75 percent of all the canvasses.

No rational explanation was given by the Comelec or Smartmatic for the 60-30-10 anomaly, until a Filipino expat in teaching in the US, Dr. Michael Purugganan of the New York University, dean of science, argued from the point of the Law of Large Numbers (LLN…one of several theorems expressing the idea that as the number of trials of a random process increases, the percentage difference between the expected and actual values goes to zero. Wolfram Mathworld), i.e. that the pattern does not necessarily indicate fraud as large numbers tend to (in my layman's terms) round off and in the case of the 2013 elections the "batched" canvassing rounded off the 60-30-10. Another was on the social media, Mike Beduya of AIM. Even AES Watch stalwarts Dr. Pablo Manalastas made the caveat that the LLN could come into play.

I interviewed Ado Paglinawan who was among the first to note and write about the 60-30-10 "template" as he calls it and I find his rejoinder to be the most logical. It's an important point to clarify as one reporter of GMA News writes of the issue, "Conspiracy or Just Math?" In such matters as election counting and process the political analysts trump the mathematician:

"…I would rather follow the logic of Hermenegildo Estrella (electrical engineer, member of Tandem), both a geek and a political animal… 'The LLN's applies only for trials from the same population, which should mean that these trials (group of votes that are counted) are, or should have come from areas, really representative of the country as a whole.'"… He compared this (batching) with what SWS and Pulse Asia do in the use of 1200 respondents as samples to predict the entire country's preferences in areas where they have initially identified as leaning to their desired outcome… Beduya analyzed the increments between each canvass and charted the peaks and valleys of shares relative to each of the canvass as it progressed from the first to the sixteenth… obviously to dispel aired suspicions that the votes followed a fixed linear pattern.

"But what Purugganan and Beduya were not aware of is that the Comelec, for the first time in the history of Philippine elections, 'batched' provinces and cities into respective canvass clusters… that batching or clustering the provincial inputs is by itself already a humongous anomaly. It presupposes … that a filtering mechanism to, the very least to group the incoming tally into clusters, existed … In layman's tongue using baseball lingo, after the ball was released by the pitcher, it did not go straight to the catcher but passed through a short-stop. This 'short stop' did not only expose the data to possible manipulation... The 60-30-10 is … a premeditated goal preprogrammed to be delivered by strategically inserted default mechanisms against opposition bailiwicks using the combined numbers of administration bailiwicks and strategically designated electronic dagdag-bawas centers…"

And what I would add is this suspicion, that the 25 percent remaining canvass that remains unreported after two weeks if where the final "doctoring" can be done just in case…

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