Senate Majority Leader Vicente Sotto III yesterday called for a Senate probe on the alleged irregularities during the May 2016 national automated elections which he said could be considered a “case of electoral sabotage” if proven true.
He said the issues cannot be ignored as it weakens the propriety of the automated election system.
“It is high time that the proper Senate committee investigates the Automated Election System and subpoena Comelec and Smartmatic to provide the relevant data as regards these allegations.”
He said he wants the probe to be immediately conducted, as Commission on Elections officials just recently voted to exercise its Option to Purchase Smartmatic’s voting counting machines for the 2019 elections.
“To me, this decision is a bit problematic, given the numerous unresolved issues that Smartmatic is being accused of in the conduct of the last 2016 national elections,” Sotto said.
“We must ascertain the accuracy of these allegations as to either make the responsible officials accountable or finally put to rest the questions clouding the results of the 2016 election.”
He said that the outcome of any investigation on the matter would lead to a more accurate and transparent system and results for the upcoming midterm polls.
Citing information from a “concerned” and “impeccably reliable source,” Sotto said that a transmission activity was captured as early as May 8, 2016—a day before the May 9 elections.
“What I am about to present to you may or may not be gospel truth but very accurate information and if these allegations are serious enough and are proven to be true after due investigation, then we have a case of electoral sabotage for the conduct of the 2016 elections,” he said.
“If we don’t do anything to clear the doubts as to the legitimacy of the previous election, then we put at risk the accuracy of the 2019 elections,” he said.
On the alleged early transmission of vote, he said, the Board of Canvassers should have convened starting at 3 p.m. of May 9, 2016 but as early as May 8, 2016, there was already a “transmission activity.”
In a privilege speech, Sotto said transmission was done by IP Address 10.11.5.5 to 0507.ccs.pili2016pinas.net as seen in logs of SRVCNTADNS01 server which is an IP address of a clustered vote counting machine or precinct count optical scan.
He also said the transmission code pointed to the Consolidated Canvassing System of the Municipality of Libon, Albay.
The early transmission, the Senate leader said, continued until the morning of May 9, which was still prior to the official conduct of the election.
“In summary, there has been an alleged early transmission of votes by certain VCMs (voting counting machines) to the Municipal Board of Canvassers. These are only examples of the numerous early transmissions to different Municipal and Provincial Board of Canvassers in Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao,” he said.
“The standard answer of Smartmatic would be that these transmissions are only ‘testing transmissions.’ These transmissions cannot be in any way be claimed as ‘testing transmissions’ because as far as I can remember, the last official testing was made on April, 23, 2016.”
Regarding the second allegation of “foreign access” in the election servers, he said there were alleged “series of access before, during and after the election.”
“A day before the May 9 elections, a username “e360sync” allegedly made a “malicious activity” which he said was a “critical intrusion to a computer system. If you do this in your own home computer, your firewall or antivirus will alert you,” he pointed out.
“So the question now is who is username e360? Apparently e360 is a server in amazonaws.com which is a cloud computing service located mainly in the United States.”
The username e360, he said, “looks very similar to a software product of the Philippine election provider ‘Smartmatic.’”
“To conclude the second issue, our election servers were allegedly accessed remotely and information gathered were copied and submitted to a server in the amazon cloud services in the United States,” Sotto said.