While the nation’s outrage is being focused more and more on the New Year’s gift of increased train fares and water rates that the Aquino administration has deigned to give us, spare some thought for the going-away present that the Commission on Elections is giving to its favorite supplier, Smartmatic. And it’s no stocking-stuffer that Chairman Sixto Brillantes is offering the election technology company, either.
But first, let’s talk about the people who are butting heads once again in the revived controversy about the always-controversial Smartmatic: The expertise of Brillantes is election law; Gus Lagman, the former Comelec commissioner who is criticizing Brillantes’ alleged favoring of Smartmatic (and who likely lost his job because of his position), is computers and information technology.
Given their backgrounds, I would rather support Lagman’s position when it comes to Smartmatic, which is again in the news after Brillantes and his commission awarded it the P300-million contract to diagnose the 82,000 precinct count optical scan machines that the government has already purchased. And I will believe Lagman even more if, in all likelihood, Brillantes awards Smartmatic with the complementary P900-million contract to make sure that its PCOS machines are up to the task of being deployed once again for the elections next year.
It’s really simple. Lagman and other critics of Brillantes have long argued that the government should never have spent the billions it did to purchase Smartmatic’s machines, which we are stuck with, along with the contracts that will allow the company to diagnose and repair them whenever an election is about to take place.
Had Comelec only leased Smartmatic’s machines, we would not even have to keep paying warehousing costs for these controversial contraptions. This would allow us to keep open the option of actually refusing to use them, should we decide to revert to manual or semi-automated vote-counting, as an increasing number of countries have decided to do.
Brillantes’ position, on the other hand, is that since we already have the machines, we might as well use them. Besides, as a lawyer, he insists that no case filed before any court or electoral tribunal questioning the results of the past two elections as counted by Smartmatic’s PCOS machines has prospered, which to the chairman’s mind means than everything is hunky-dory as far as using them in future elections is concerned.
In other words, in Brillantes’ mind, we have no choice but to live with Smartmatic’s election counting machines, even if we probably didn’t need to buy them in the first place. Besides, the law says that elections should be automated beginning in 2010, he says, so there is really nothing Comelec can do about it, either.
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But Brillantes’ thinking on the matter is flawed, precisely because it presumes that we can no longer do anything about Smartmatic, its machines or all the subsequent billions that it stands to make every election season, at the rate Comelec is giving it contracts. The fact that Brillantes and his commission awarded the company P300 million just to look over the machines it sold through negotiation instead of a regular bidding speaks volumes about the extremely cozy, long-running relationship between the election agency and its favored provider.
Why Brillantes, whose term ends next month, is even entering into contracts that he will not see to their fruition is in itself anomalous, to say the least. At this point, what the outgoing chairman should concern himself with is wrapping up his affairs, instead of gifting his agency’s favored suppliers with hundred-million-peso presents.
After all, while Smartmatic may not have been proven to have used its technology to benefit any candidate, it is already guilty of the serious crime of failing to bring about more transparency in our already questionable election process. By making the process of toting up the vote, especially at the precinct level, more obscure by removing the old manual safeguards, Smartmatic—and Comelec, naturally—should by rights have been prevented from any further involvement in the process.
Of course, Brillantes argues that the serious flaws that people like Lagman have always pointed out in Smartmatic’s system, like the lack of digital signatures and other audit-friendly tools, have all been set aside by decisions issued by the courts. Unfortunately for Brillantes, the perception that his commission has always been acting like the lawyer of its supplier, instead of its skeptical overseer, is not helping the election agency win over those who believe that Smartmatic is a handsomely-paid tool to steal elections with its pricey technology.
When Brillantes leaves Comelec, he will likely be missed by Smartmatic, which never had it so good as it had during his watch. But his long love affair with the Comelec’s supplier will remain in the contracts that he is awarding, which will make sure that his legacy as Smartmatic’s most generous friend remains.