2019 elections: ‘ or ‘

THE 2019 national and local elections ( NLE) are fast approaching. And the Smartmatic saga of non-compliance with the Automated Election System (AES) law, or RA 9369, ineptness in conducting comprehensive testing of the AES project components, inaccurate counting and canvassing, unsecure transmission of election results etc., keep on haunting our - parency, credibility and true will of the people. A basic question arises: Is the accuracy of vote count really that important? Let’s fast-rewind on what happened in Episodes I to V.

It all started in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) elections on August 11, 2008, when the Venezuelan company, Smartmatic, ran their Direct Recording Electronic (DRE), or touchscreen technology, in some provinces of ARMM. The Asian Network for Free Elections (ANFREL) said that “there were some problems with the transmission of data, particularly in Maguindanao, and it took BEIs and Smartmatic staff a long time to realize the failure.” Due to loose systemic and procedural controls, there was also an incident report but it was not investigated when Smartmatic was able to change election results in the computer server remotely!

Episode I (2008). Episode Part 1 II ( 2009).

Comelec required paper-based AES, or optical machine recognition (OMR) technology for the 2010 elections and that the provider should be ISO9000 certified. Since Smartmatic didn’t know anything about OMR, or the commonly known Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) which we used in 2010, 2013 and 2016 NLE. Smartmatic collaborated with a Canadian PCOS company, Dominion Voting Taiwanese manufacturing company, Jarltech. During the BAC evaluation of suppliers’ eligibility, Smartmatic failed in their demonstration. Nonetheless, Smartmatic won the bidding despite not owning the technology and not being do you call Smartmatic in that regard? They purely acted as a sales agent of Dominion. ‘

Smartmatic’ and

Episode III (2010).

One week before the May 10, 2010 elections, the 76,000 PCOS machines failed testing and sealing on May 3, 2010. A case in point in Makati City: the votes of Binay and Mercado were counted in favor of Genuino. The reason behind the inaccuracy of counting was due to the non-compliance of the technical evaluation committee to institute the compensating controls recommended by the certifying body, Systest Labs.