President Duterte should rescind Smartmatic contract

DUE to its shady background, and charges of anomalies against it in various countries including the US, Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela, the company Smartmatic should be banned from any involvement in Philippine elections.

President Rodrigo Duterte is the only one with the power to do so: he can start by rescinding the contract of Smartmatic to provide vote-counting machines (VCMs) and tech support for the 2019 elections. With a year to go, there is still time to clean up our electoral system without this dubious organization messing things up.

Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela, were clients of Smartmatic and their elections were all riddled with doubt and controversy because of the delays in vote count, defective machines, purported padding of votes, and alleged technical manipulation. The coup de grace was seeing unpopular candidates get voted into office. Sounds very familiar? Indeed, the Philippines has been a client of Smartmatic since 2010.

The US government had investigated Smartmatic in 2006 because of its purported ties to leftist Venezuelan president and avowed enemy of the US, Hugo Chavez. Venezuela’s state financing agency invested in Smartmatic and even placed an ally in its board. Smartmatic was given three lucrative contracts by Chavez, and needless to say, the poll results from these Venezuelan elections and referendum where their machines were used, were widely disputed.

But with its largesse from Venezuela, Smartmatic was able to buy the Sequoia Voting System of California. Instantly, it became a player in the US electoral system since Sequoia was already established in 17 federal states. (Poll irregularities were reported in Chicago and Utah, where SmartmaticSequoia machines were used.)

Chavez’ possible involvement in an election service provider operating in the US suddenly put the federal government on the alert. The congressional Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States grilled Smartmatic on its ties to a Marxist government, and amid what was shaping to be a PR disaster for the company, it decided to sell its stake in Sequoia.

Say what you will about the US but when it comes to the enemies of their state they go all out in fighting.

How I wish our own Congress or Senate can be as protective of our electoral system. We have done so many hearings and investigations on the reported defective machines and possible vote manipulation in the 2010, 2013, and 2016 elections, and yet after the initial burst of energy, there was no follow-through from our legislators or from the executive department.

Year after year, ever since the Philippines allowed this Venezuelan (or US or UK firm; its hazy corporate roots snake out all over the world) company to take over our electoral system in 2010, we have heard calls from various civil society group, electoral watchdogs, lawyers groups, engineers, information technology experts, and other professionals urging government to stop its association with Smartmatic.

All these calls have fallen on deaf ears and the Commission on Elections continues to do business with Smartmatic. Despite the various reports of voting irregularities during the 2016 elections – including the controversial changing of a server “script” as the votes were coming in, by a foreigner no less, a Smartmatic official – the Comelec still renewed the contract of the company to provide machines for the May 2019 midterm elections.

That renewal in itself deserves a thorough investigation for possible graft and corruption. Three weeks before he retired, then acting Comelec chairman Christian Robert Lim signed the deal to buy P2.2 billion worth of Smartmatic machines. It appears to be a midnight deal with no public bidding, and became known only after it was exposed by presidential adviser on political affairs Francis Tolentino.

Smartmatic, and for all appearances its “partner” the Comelec, are again under the grill following the hearings by the Senate Committee on Electoral Reforms. This followed the privilege speeches of Senate President Vicente Sotto III last March 6 and 14 where he exposed the alleged irregularities and anomalies in the May 2016 elections.

Sotto said in his speech that there were early transmission of votes from various precincts around the country, sending results a day before the elections to municipal and provincial canvassers. One cluster of machines sending early votes came from Libon municipality in Albay, he said.

As his evidence, Sotto had a copy of the logs on the main server for all the vote counting machines and the consolidated canvassing system. He has as well a source, a “concerned and impeccably reliable source,” who also said that Senators Panfilo Lacson, Grace Poe and Juan Miguel Zubiri got zero votes in hundreds of polling precincts while six candidates (whom he did not name) benefited from the alleged fraud in the automated electoral system.

Lawyer and IT expert Glenn Chong also reported before the Senate that there were 459 precincts that transmitted votes one day before the elections to municipal and provincial canvassers. He said he also had in his possession the server logs, which showed this anomalous transaction (he said his investigation was separate from Sotto’s although they arrived at similar findings on the early transmission of votes).

The Comelec could only give confused explanations for these alleged anomalies. It claimed the machines were supposed to be turned “off” the day before the elections but couldn’t account for the transmission log. Was it a cloned VCM that sent the early votes? What party or parties had access to the Smartmatic machines and servers?

Sotto also revealed that that a foreign party, possibly from the US, was accessing the Philippines’ electoral main servers before, during, and after the elections, using the user name “e36sync”.

The information from local servers were accessed remotely and copied to a server in the Amazon cloud services, the senator said, adding: “To dig deeper, the username e360 looks very similar to a software product of the Philippine election provider, Smartmatic.”

We commend Senator Sotto for having the guts, unlike the other senators, to put to task the Comelec for its serious inadequacies in protecting our electoral process. We hope that President Duterte will heed the call of various citizens groups to rescind the Comelec’s arrangement with Smartmatic. The integrity of our elections is at stake.