Another petition has been filed before the Supreme Court seeking to compel the Commission on Elections to implement additional measures in the automated election system (AES) to prevent fraudulent acts.
This came after Al Argosino, election lawyer of President-elect Rodrigo Duterte in his disqualification case prior to the May 9 polls, has joined a previous bid in the high tribunal calling for more measures to prevent electronic cheating in the country’s automated polls.
Argosino backed the petition filed by former Metro Rail Transit general manager Al Vitangcol III who was seeking to compel the Comelec to adopt additional measures in the automated election system.
Argosino’s petition, which cited the same material allegations and arguments in Vitangcol’s documents, was consolidated by the SC with the previous petition.
During its en banc session Tuesday, the SC ordered the Comelec to file its comment on Argosino’s petition within 10 days from notice.
The petitions specifically asked the SC to order the Comelec to conduct an inventory of identification numbers of vote counting machines and also make a list of all the internet protocol (IP) and Media Access Control addresses that it will use in its Virtual Private Network, together with their geographical locations used in the polls.
An IP address is the numerical label assigned to each device participating in a computer network while a MAC address is a globally unique identifier assigned to network devices often referred to as hardware or physical address of the device. Both are considered fingerprints of individuals in cyberspace.
Petitioners argued that these measures are necessary for the poll body to be able to trace electronic cheating in the AES.
They cited reports in the 2010 polls about “rogue” machines that were allegedly used to manipulate the results of the elections, referring to the 60 units of Precinct Count Optical Scan recovered in the house of a Smartmatic-TIM technician in Antipolo City.
Petitioners said that there is a risk that a sniffer could capture the data transmission in next week’s polls when the VCMs transmit the election returns to the Comelec’s central server, the transparency server and another server at the joint congressional canvassing.
The petitions were following the leak of data of over 50 million voters from the Comelec database before the May 9 polls, which prompted fears from several sectors of possible cheating in the polls.