Are we sleepwalking into elections? / Start-up in Chile

It seems we are. The government, predatory politicians and unwary citizens are being sucked into a vortex to be ready for elections, however it will be conducted. In other words, we are going into it with closed eyes and hope that it will work.

It seems to me that the Comelec will brazen it out, confident that it can use the flawed Smartmatic voting system once again this year.

As far as Comelec is concerned the Filipino electorate is not organized to challenge the perfidy of a trumped up automated election system, they will get away with it. If they were able to get away with it in 2010 why should they not get away with it again in 2013?

Institutions like Congress, the Supreme Court, have been preempted so questions or electoral complaints will remain that – complaints – but not acted on.

Indeed, these very institutions will be used to give the stamp of approval to the elected candidates. Its purpose of being the guardians against fraud or failed elections will have been turned upside down. Instead of ensuring honest and transparent elections it will be used to give the elections and its elected candidates their stamp of approval and that is all there is to it. Citizens can kick and scream “fraud” to no avail once the election is done, however it is done. Remember Congress acting as the Presidential Electoral Tribunal rushed the tabulation despite legitimate objections and ambassadors trooped to congratulate the President elect in his house even before the tabulation was finished in 2010?

The electoral body is betting on a calculated risk that if it worked in 2010, it will work in 2013 and 2016. In the Smartmatic suit against Dominion Voting Systems, it was found out that Dominion was the true owner of the Smartmatic technology/software. Comelec admits it did not know that.

With the case still pending in Delaware, Smartmatic will not have the source code of Dominion’’s voting system. In the suit filed in the Delaware Chancery Court in the US, Smartmatic “admits programming errors in the voting system.”

Dominion Voting System accused Smartmatic of “not observing proper pre-election technical preparations for the system in the last 2010 first national automated elections which resulted in many technical glitches nationwide.”

Dominion has terminated its license to Smartmatic to use its software for 2013. The question is what software is it going to use having already received payments from Comelec to do the job? No wonder people are calling it ‘hocus PCOS.” Throughout the arduous and difficult campaign to bring the issue of automated election fraud to the public, there have been a few brave souls who have never let go even if it seemed hopeless.

Rene Azurin in his Business World column is one of them. I am quoting from his column about the observations of Barbara Simon of the US Advisory Board of the Federal Elections Commission. She was also past president of the Association for Computing Machinery in the US. Here is what she says:

“Having the software source code doesn’t guarantee that you will detect critical software bugs or malicious code. Anyone with access to the election software of a major voting machine vendor can change the outcome of a national election.”

Election fraud can now be committed on a national, not just a local, basis… (And) if you are going to subvert software, you are not going to do something that will be found by a checklist. It’s easy to insert a Trojan Horse into the software because the testing won’t find it.” (The cheating does not take place in the counting after the votes have been cast, but in the programming of the machines. In other words the machines elect).

Azurin says that “as far as the proprietary system of the favored Venezuelan firm Smartmatic International Inc. is concerned, it is not altogether clear what arrangements with respect to the software code have been agreed with Comelec.

“That knowledge is why the trend in the US – in the light of several close contested races, notably the 2000 presidential elections – has veered away from fully automated systems and toward more manual, paper-based systems where counting and tallying can be easily verified by independent observers.” Is anyone in Comelec listening?

The Supreme Court should be playing a pivotal and important part on how to resolve the controversies surrounding the Smartmatic PCOs. But with its clipped wings, it may be too optimistic to expect these justices not to be afraid of impeachment and harassment. The latest in the PCOs saga and the coming elections is the announcement (shocking) from Comelec there will no longer be padlocks on ballot boxes.

When the APEC-ABAC opens its doors tomorrow in Manila to discuss how public and private sector can cooperate to promote business, there will be smiling faces among the Chileans in the crowd. It will announce and talk about their latest program called “Start-up Chile.” It is an ingenious program to invite what it called “world class early stage entrepreneurs to start their businesses in Chile.” Some quick thinking Chilean official got it right. It is not investments that make successful businesses. More needed is an entrepreneurial spirit.

No wonder, Chilean Ambassador Roberto Mayorga is keen that members of APEC-ABAC hear about his government’s innovative program. It opens opportunities for bright and aspiring business people.

In a nutshell, “Start-Up Chile” would promote global and high-potential entrepreneurship among local entrepreneurs. It would be the vehicle through which Chile would become the innovation hub of Latin America, according to a brochure.

The ambitious and innovative program will not require “debt or equity from the program’s participants.” What they will require is that the applicants leave an impact on the local entrepreneurship environment by transferring their knowledge, skills, and global mindsets. It is envisaged that this in turn would encourage the Chilean innovators to be global entrepreneurs. So far it has received 1,421 applications from 60 countries. The successful candidates will receive $40,000 in seed funding without giving up any equity stake, the only obligation is to live in Chile for at least 6 months.

The Chilean government hopes to attract a wide selection of entrepreneurs. As a Chilean official closely associated with the program said in a newspaper interview, there is such a thing as a typical “Start-Up Chile kind of guy.”

It will accept entrepreneurs who are able to convince the jury that their business model was saleable.