So is it goodbye, Smartmatic?

AFTER President Duterte advised the Commission on Elections (Comelec) last Thursday to look for another technology provider that is free of fraud, politicians of all shades and colors joined each other in a chorus of complaints against the only automated vote counting system that the country has known since the 2010 presidential elections.

It seems that every candidate has something bad to say about the country’s highly paid service provider and the credibility of the election results it has reported in the last four elections. Duterte himself said that the votes were not being counted truthfully and the Filipinos no longer want Smartmatic.

Curiously and as an aside, in the country’s most recent elections, Duterte’s candidates grabbed all the 12 Senate seats available. It was the same in the local level with only a very few opposition candidates surviving the administration juggernaut. And the votes were not counted truthfully? Hyperbole, maybe?

His chief lawyer and spokesperson quickly sought to cushion whatever doubt the President’s statement created on the legitimacy of the victory of his candidates. The President’s remarks should not be interpreted to mean that the May 13 elections is not honest nor credible because it is, Salvador Panelo said.

“The President is not comfortable with these allegations that produce a whiff of fraud or delay in the announcing of the election results,” according to

Panelo. Now don’t bang your head on the wall if you cannot figure out what he was trying to say because you are not alone. There is a system to obfuscation.

The President could have simply said he has had enough of Smartmatic and stopped there. It has become a magnet to claims of electoral fraud and it has not done anything over the years to repair its reputation. On the contrary, voters and candidates continue to be oppressed by the same electronic glitches that surfaced as early as in the first election that it assisted.

But is there really an animal as a fraud-free technology provider? Machines don’t cheat, humans do. For as long as there is human intervention in the entire electoral process, there is going to be no end to complaints of cheating.

This is specially true in this country where the humility to accept defeat is a virtue that is wanting in many if not most politicians. The Tagalogs have a very apt description of their kind: sobrang bilib sa sarili. To him, the only acceptable outcome of the election is victory. Either that or he was cheated.

What makes this more complicated is the presence of some unscrupulous people who propose to fix the election for a fee, of course. And they don’t come cheap. They talk millions.

In the last elections, at least two candidates were approached with the same offer. Both refused. One of them won, the other lost. In all probability, the election “brokers” are con men who really have no power to decide an election. Their fees are contingent except for a few hundred thousand pesos for expenses. If the paying candidate wins, the con man returns and collect his fees. If the candidate loses, he simply disappears with the deposit.

Their activities have been known since the start of the automated vote counting system. Surprisingly, no one has been arrested yet.

You can be certain they will still be around after we have kicked out Smartmatic.