That May 2010 election monster, the PCOS machine, re-surfaces for 2013 elections

That May 2010 election monster, the PCOS machine, re-surfaces for 2013 elections, after Comelec resuscitates ‘dead contract’ to purchase 82,000 units from Smartmatic at P1.8 billion. Recalling ‘Koala Boy’ and frightening pattern of wholesale defeats in 2010. Civic groups led by Archbishop Capalla and IT experts file MR against SC’s 11-3 decision upholding that contract---suntok sa buwan?

POLITICAL TIDBITS

Belinda Olivares-Cunanan

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Soon after the May 10, 2012 presidential and local elections, the House committee on suffrage and electoral reforms, chaired by former Makati Rep. Teodoro Locsin Jr., began a month-long inquiry into that exercise, during which dozens of candidates from around the country who had lost testified. As a veteran political observer of 25 years, who was then connected with a major newspaper, I covered those hearings of TeddyBoy’s committee day in and day out, in view of their historic significance as our first fully-automated elections. I reported on them in great detail in my columns.

At first I thought the House committee hearings represented just another of those traditional ho-hum inquiries where Pinoy candidates didn’t lose but instead were "cheated" of victory. But when so many candidates began to exhibit a frightening pattern of wholesale defeats, most of them studiously backed up by elaborate evidence of electoral failings never before seen here, I began to take a serious look at a new election monster---the PCOS machines of Smartmatic-TIM (SMTT).

After their defects and glitches surfaced dizzyingly in so many places, they came to be known as “Hocus PCOS” (trust former President Estrada to coin that term).

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Soon enough political pundits began to wonder: just how high did the manipulation of the May 2010 elections go?  There was clamor from some quarters afterwards for an independent commission to investigate the shenanigans in those elections, but this was ignored. Will we ever find out the truth?

Unfortunately, today, as Comelec prepares for the mid-term elections of 2013, the PCOS machines have been resurrected---despite the fact that the poll body’s option to purchase (OTP) them from SMTT had expired last December 31, 2010.  Comelec entered into this new contract that SMTT was only too willing to “extend” last March 2012 for P1.8 billion---this time to buy those 82,000 PCOS machines that have been in storage for the past two years, with many proven defective in the 2010 elections.

Several citizens’ organizations led by Davao Archbishop Fernando Capalla and former Vice President Tito Guingona, as well as the Solidarity for Sovereignty and Tanggulang Demokrasya, seek to stop this OTP because it’s a “dead option contract.” that had expired in December 2010. The protesters rightly claim that a new contract should involve new public bidding, as the law requires, but this was not done.

Obviously, to push selling its old PCOS stock, SMTT claims that the allegations of its defects---totaling 236 as asserted by ousted Comelec Commissioner Gus Lagman, the only IT expert among the poll body’s seven top officials---are being addressed by its Cabuyao, Laguna HQ. IT experts, however, are plainly skeptical about this claim.

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In fact, SMTT claims that it’s testing some 3,500 PCOS units a day---which includes the power source, the CF card ports, thermal printer, scanning capacity, UV sensors and modem transmissions. But the IT experts who have long been scrutinizing the PCOS’ performance, laugh off this fat claim as mission impossible.

IT expert Lito Averia opines that even assuming that it takes one hour to check one PCOS unit (including unpacking and re-packing), SMTT has to have  some 450 technicians/testers hired for this purpose---not the handful at Cabuyao that media have seen. But even granting na nga, says Averia, that checking each unit takes just half an hour, 225 technicians/testers are still needed per day.

The IT people assert that this SMTT claim has to be a joke. “Kung visual inspection lang, pwede pa matapos ng ganoon, but not an honest to goodness check-up of machines that had malfunctioned in 2010 and kept in storage for two years,” they stress.

To quote Rep. Rudy Farinas, it’s an SMTT PALUSOT and it’s sad that Comelec is buying this story lock, stock and barrel.

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What’s even sadder are the developments at the Supreme Court. Early in May this year, the SC, led by then Chief Justice Renato Corona, issued a TRO through a vote of 8 vs. 7 against the Comelec-SMTT  PCOS purchase contract inked last March, in order to hear arguments on both sides. But on June 13, 2012---exactly 15 days after CJ Corona was ousted by the Senate---the SC reversed itself in a vote of 11-3 and upheld the purchase contract (four justices moved from AGAINST to PRO-contract after Corona was sacked. This is regarded as immediate proof of his impeachment’s chilling effect on the Court.

Yesterday the consolidated IT organization called Automated Election System Watch (AESW) filed a motion for reconsideration of that SC decision upholding the contract. It’s a suntok sa buwan by the AESW, for the magistrates’ pro-contract vote is massive.  BUT IT’S A BLOW FOR DEMOCRACY.

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Soon after the May 2010 elections, stunning cases of massive defeats were disclosed simultaneous with the surfacing in media of a mysterious masked character nicknamed “Koala Boy” by TeddyBoy Locsin. Koala Boy alleged he was part of a big group of “players,” “operators” and “coordinators” as well as their allies in the Comelec that manipulated the national and local elections to favor candidates who paid their steep fees.

Koala Boy asserted that the “simple” operations (“pindot-pindot lang”),  made through the PCOS machines, involved three steps:  l). the switching of ballots in the PCOS machines, using ballots outside of the Comelec stock;  2). the pre-programming the CF cards (recall that the CF cards were discovered to be “defected” and supposed to have been “corrected” the weekend before the elections, but apparently never were in many places); and 3). The transmission of spurious returns bearing duplicate serial numbers from the syndicates’ own PCOS machines---capable of transmitting from 24,000 to 30,000 ballots in one instance.

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Koala Boy said he surfaced because he was conscience-stricken, but he never showed up after one appearance, doubtless for fear of his life. There was skepticism---and even cynicism---in some quarters about his incredible allegations, but the coincidental stories of massive defeats of power blocs in various regions were just too stunning and numerous to ignore.

For instance, former Rep. Ace Barbers of Surigao del Norte, then running for governor, lost with his entire line-up that included his vice-gubernatorial candidate, two candidates for representative and all his 21 mayors.  Ace could really have lost, but all the 21 mayors? There was the three-term popular governor of North Cotabato, Manny Piñol, at that time running for Vice-Governor, who also lost wholesale with his local candidates. There were also re-electionist Rep. Glenn Chiong, vice-mayoralty candidate of Tagaytay Mark Tan, and many other cases of candidates who seemed to have been  “deleted” in the computers.

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Other cases of high improbability last May 2010:  Cebu Gov. Gwen Garcia of the powerful Garcia clan lost in her own barangay in Carcar as well as in Mandaue City where she asserted that the first time she ran there in 2007 she won by 45,000 (she lost last May 2010 in Mandaue by 15,000 there even with Rep. Nerisa Soon's and her opponent's support).  Former President Estrada, then a presidential candidate, lost in his own precinct in San Juan.

Former Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita lost in his own bailiwick even as all his mayors won; both former Secretary Raul Gonzalez and his reelectionist son, Rep. Raul Jr., lost in their own bailiwick in Iloilo. Former Manila Mayor Lito Atienza, on the other hand, recounted a story from a witness who claimed she saw the feeding of fake ballots right in City Hall.

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What's happening to PCOS?

FROM A DISTANCE
By Carmen N. Pedrosa (The Philippine Star)
Updated July 01, 2012 12:00 AM

Comelec seems bent on using the PCOS regardless of unresolved issues.

Are Filipinos being disenfranchised slowly but surely? Comelec renewed the PCOS contract illegally after the impeachment of Chief Justice Renato Corona, with the intimidated Supreme Court voting in favor of the renewal, 11-3.

I was at the hearing and I remember one justice saying that there was no more time to question and change the system. The lawyers sitting around me looked askance, amazed a justice would even say that. The Supreme Court is a trier of law, not of fact. If the Comelec did not follow the requirements of law to renew the contract then it should not have renewed the contract, period. All the rest is subterfuge.

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We have a problem in our hands because it is not easy for ordinary voters to understand the technology of the machines and the automated electoral system. Without a public outcry Comelec hopes it can get away using the same machines.

The starkest example of why the machines cannot be trusted came from former North Cotabato Governor Manny Pinol. He found ballots from Colombia in a machine. It is clear that something very wrong happened.

If the machines were trustworthy as Smartmatic-PCOS says they are, it is unbelievable that ballots from Colombia should end up being counted in the Philippines. Pinol also reports thermal papers in the ER envelopes which either did not have any Comelec seal or had Citibank Visa Paylite and Citibank Mastercard markings.

We should have believed the whistleblower derisively called Koala Bear when he said there were two ways to tamper election results: “hacking” and “pre-loading.”

 As the official Comelec documents in Biliran later show, these 2 modes appear to have taken place.

The audit logs from each pcos machine) taken in relation to the print logs (from the municipal server) show at least 3 apparent modes of “hacking”:

Unauthorized transmission and receipt of electronic returns from an unknown source (where the PCOS machine repeatedly failed to transmit and then closed at 8 p.m., but the municipal server surprisingly received a transmission from the said pcos/precinct 3 hours later at 11 p.m., of May 10);

Unauthorized double transmission and receipt of electronic returns from the same PCOS machine with assigned clustered precinct but using distinctly different IP addresses;

(3) unauthorized double use of one and the same IP address to transmit electronic election returns from 2 different pcos machines of 2 separate clustered precincts.

The preloading mode was also used in Biliran. The audit logs from each pcos machine show apparent preloading of ballots into the CF cards. This is shown by the “protective counter” entries in the audit logs which counts the numbers of ballots the pcos had scanned. 

If the pcos machines were actually reconfigured as what Comelec says, then the protective counters should have restarted with 0 before testing and sealing. So that after testing and sealing with 10 ballots, the first official ballot cast would be numbered 11. Data from Biliran will show that of the 145 official PCOS audit logs available, only 2 PCOS had protective counters starting at 0. All the 143 pcos had initial protective counter numbers anywhere from 1 to 128 with a great majority at 29 scans before testing and sealing.

The total initial scans for all 143 PCOS is 4,114 ballots scanned before testing and sealing. The CF card controls the protective counter mechanism so that if they showed initial data before any official ballot is cast, it only means they were not in fact reconfigured after all.

The evidence of fraud lies in the audit trail of the automated election system. If only the parties concerned or the people, as in the case of Biliran, were able to get the PCOS audit logs and mboc print logs. More of similar cases as shown in Biliran could have been discovered.

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With the Comelec renewing the contract of Smartmatic-PCOS with the same machines and electoral system we are cooked. This spells trouble.

It is shocking to hear from Smartmatic Asia president Cesar Flores, that the machines can produce receipts for 2013, but it is the Comelec that does not want the function used?

Smartmatic-PCOS claims all the glitches of the May 2010 elections have been corrected but did not say what the glitches were.

Surprisingly, Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile has given the go-signal to use PCOS machines as well as the consolidated canvassing system (CCS) machines in next year’s mid-term elections.

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In my opinion it would be more useful to look at the complaints in every country where Smartmatic PCOS machines and its automated electoral system were used. That would give us a better picture on what is going on.

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Senate buzz on vote on Corona: “worry not about INC, we have PCOS”

POLITICAL TIDBITS

Belinda-Olivares Cunanan

Wednesday, 20 June 2012

www.polbits.com

polbits@yahoo.com

The SC’s recent decision to lift the TRO on the petition of four different organizations to junk the P1.8 billion contract between Comelec and Smartmatic to purchase the much-discredited PCOS machines is being offered as evidence of the anticipated “chilling effect” on the SC of the ouster of Corona. That view is totally justified. Recall that the TRO on that contract was a tight 8-7 decision of the magistrates, led by CJ Corona, last May; but early last week, three weeks after he was ousted by the Senate, the SC decision became 11-3 for the lifting of this TRO and upholding the validity of the contract that was done without proper bidding. Four justices moved from against to pro-contract.

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On the other hand, the three SC justices who voted against the contract with Smartmatic, namely, Arturo Brion, Martin Villarama and Estela Perlas-Bernabe, are being lauded for standing firm against the PCOS, despite P-Noy’s naked interference when he expressed strong preference for it the day before the SC decision’s promulgation. Bernabe, the most recent of three P-Noy appointees, is thought of as a “deodorizer,” so that it couldn’t be said that his appointees went solid for the contract.

I attended the first SC hearing on this issue late last April and Justice Arturo Brion impressed me with his well-thought out questions to the petitioners’ lawyers. Brion, valedictorian of his Ateneo law class and a bar-topnotcher, has a reputation for being quite independent-minded and would actually make a good CJ, but I doubt if he’d ever come close to appointment, given P-Noy’s tuta requirement.

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As mentioned in this blog earlier, the lawyers for the anti-contract petitioners led by Davao Archbishop Fernando Capalla were contemplating whether to file a motion for reconsideration (MR) of the SC decision on the PCOS---given the seemingly hopelessness in the face of the massive 11-3 decision. But now the lawyers have agreed to file that MR even though it may be “suntok sa bwan,” as Tandem lawyer Demosthenes Donato puts it.

I agree on the MR as it will tell the Filipino people---with the help of media that care---about the dangers to the 2013 elections of using those machines once again. Let’s put the MR on record for history as a protest of Comelec’s cavalier attitude towards the requisites for clean and honest elections.

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What the four citizens’ groups that filed that petition vs. the PCOS contract feel terrible about is that the high court chose to zero in on the validity of the contract and ignored the defects of the automated election system (AES) peddled by Smartmatic and those 82,000 PCOS machines. The petitioners’ lawyers argue that unlike the claim of Smartmatic that there were just “glitches” in the AES system and that these have already been “corrected,” it actually has “major fundamental defects” that have not been attended to.

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Three of the most serious defects, maintain the petitioners’ lawyers, are:

1). the failure of Smartmatic’s AES to meet the 99.995 percent accuracy level of the PCOS machines, demanded in its contract with Comelec. This was despite the attestation to this level by the PPCRV, which is being ridiculed as “Smartmatic’s ‘unofficial’ spokesperson; 2). The lack of functional digital signatures of the machines, owing to Comelec’s unexplained Resolution No. 8786 in May, 2010, which ordered all the board of election inspectors (BEI) nationwide to disregard these signatures’ use; as a result, the electronic election returns pouring into Comelec’s system couldn’t be traced accurately, and 3). The thorough vulnerability of the PCOS machines to hacking from outside, as shown in the May 2010 elections.

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On the issue of the lack of “digital signatures” on any of the electronic election returns nationwide, Tandem asserts that “it necessarily follows that the constitutional mandate to secure the ‘sanctity of the ballot’ has been grossly violated during the May 2010 national and local elections.

On the other hand, with regard to the ease of hacking these machines, it will be recalled that many unauthorized PCOS machines were recovered from various areas, the most notorious of which were the 60 found in Antipolo. Who were operating them? Will these operators be active again in 2013?

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Prodded by well-meaning citizens’ groups such as the “Consumer Watch” of Raul Concepcion for Comelec to act now to implement the AES for the 2013 elections, the petitioners’ groups led by Archbishop Capalla and Tandem are not buying the proposal of Smartmatic to conduct random tests on the viability of the repaired PCOS machines.  To oppose such random tests is a valid posture. For just like the P39 billion conditional cash transfer (CCT) program of the P-Noy administration for 2012 (which will balloon to P49 billion in 2013), which likes to show off its efficacy by selecting “pilot areas” where all factors are under its control, the Smartmatic demo will show one or two machines “working” in say, its Cabuyao HQ and perhaps in one or two more places.  But what about the rest of the 82,000 across the archipelago?

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Many political pundits have noted that during the vote on CJ Corona’s fate following his Senate impeachment trial, the “Sanctimonious 20” senators appeared to have ignored the plea of the powerful Iglesia ni Cristo sect to vote for his acquittal. The question on many minds was, how could this have happened, when in the past these politicians would assiduously court the INC’s solid vote? Some pundits have offered as answer the PCOS machines which have now been given free rein to determine the outcome of our 2013 elections.

Talk in the Senate in the final days of the Corona trial was the reported admonition from the President’s allies:  Ignore the INC. Worry not, we have the PCOS.

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