The Supreme Court has been asked to compel the Commission on Elections to employ necessary measures intended to prevent electronic cheating during the May 9 general elections.
In a 17-page petition, former general manager of the Manila Rail Transit Al Vitangcol III also pleaded that the Comelec should also be directed to conduct an inventory of identification numbers of voting machines.
Vitangcol said the Comelec should provide a list of all the IP (Internet Protocol) and MAC (Media Access Control) addresses that it will use in its Virtual Private Network, together with their geographical locations.
“We want to know these details so that in case there will be electronic cheating, there will be a way to trace it,” Vitangcol said in an interview.
A MAC address is a globally unique identifier assigned to network devices. It is often referred to as hardware or physical address of the device while IP address is the numerical label assigned to each device participating in a computer network.
A MAC and IP addresses are like fingerprints of individuals.
In 2010, Vitangcol claimed that there were reports that some 60 units of Precinct Count Optical Scan recovered in the house of a Smartmatic-TIM technician in Antipolo City.
There were allegations that the “rogue” machines were used to manipulate the results of the elections.
“However, nothing can be ascertained because Comelec does not have the records of the MAC addresses of their legitimate PCOS machines and computers nor the list of IP addresses that were assigned to the devices during the 2010 elections,” Vitangcol stressed.
“Without such inventory of MAC addresses and IP addresses, the public—even Respondent Comelec would end up scratching their heads, wondering what went wrong,” he said.
Vitangcol filed the case in his capacity as the country’s first E-Commerce Council certified Computer Hacking Forensic Investigator and author of several law and technology books.
However, Comelec Chairman Andres Bautista said that if there is one thing that worries the poll body this coming elections, it is the scorching summerin the country.
Bautista said due to the summer heat, voters might be discouraged to come out and vote.
He howerver assured the public that the summer heat will not have any adverse effect on the vote counting machines (VCMs).
“These were tested under stressful conditions. The question is really the effect of hot weather on our people,” the Comelec official stressed.
Bautista also believed that this could be worsened by the need to print voting receipts for every voter.
The Comelec said it expected the requirement of printing voting receipts to increase the voting period to 20 hours from the present 11 hours.
Bautista said he and the other commissioners are “more prepared” to hold this year’s election than the first two political exercises in 2010 and 2013.
He said the Comelec set a record of sorts after it and the National Printing Office completed the printing and verication of the officials ballots for only 49 days on April 22, 2016.