“There remain many questions to be answered.”
Talks about ensuring a “peaceful and orderly” as well as “clean, honest and fair” elections may yet turn out to be lip service, after all.
This surfaced as the Commission on Elections (Comelec) has reportedly failed to answer questions about the data security in the use of the vote-counting machines (VCMs) on May 9 national elections.
At stake in Monday’s polls is the Filipino people’s choice of leaders whom they trust will steward the country to economic recovery in the wake of more than two years of pandemic devastation.
Four days until the nation troops to the polls, the Comelec kept mum about “defects” of Smartmatic’s 107,000 VCMs and servers that would undermine the credibility of the outcome of the elections.
Just recently, Smartmatic was hacked by its own employees, raising doubts on the reliability and credibility of its VCMs.
Reports have it that various Comelec offices complained about the said defects but have yet to be addressed contrary to the poll body’s press releases that the VCMs proved “flawless” during tests.
Being in-charge of the elections, Commissioner Marlon Casquejo is conspicuously silent or not being forthright about the preparations for Monday when 67 million Filipinos go out and vote for a new president and other officials.
Political pundit Jarius Bondoc pointed out: “No one but Smartmatic’s tech masters know if the VCMs and servers are maliciously programmed to add votes to one candidate and subtract from another.”
Comelec also has no way of verifying if the source code CDs submitted by Smartmatic to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) are the same as what it will use on Monday.
Source codes are the computer commands that run the VCMs and servers.
The Comelec must secure independent certifications 90 days before the election day but the poll body missed the Feb. 9 deadline.
The Automated Election Law mandates the Comelec to have the VCM source code certified by professional bodies. As well, the source codes of the central, backup and transparency servers that will add up each machine’s count.
It turned out that automated election experts, including Dr. Nelson Celis of the Automated Election Watch, had called the Comelec’s attention about the problems with Smartmatic’s VCMs but the pleas were all ignored.
To think that all this time the Comelec has been busy putting up the repetitious “Presidential Debates” television show.
To think that, if a great number of VCMs malfunction on election day, the whole exercise might result in “failure of election.”
If the Comelec fails to act on the VCMs issues, not quite a few people might suspect it all part of a sinister scheme to deprive the nation of their constitutional right of suffrage.
If the Comelec’s incompetence leads to failure of elections, it could plunge the country into anarchy and chaos amid ailing economy and persistent issues of government corruption and human rights abuses.