Why PCOS is inappropriate

The Comelec is to spend up to P14 billion to repurchase more of the machines that already proved wrong in 2010 and 2013.

To my column the other Friday, “Chairman Andy, beware of PCOS and Comelec mafia,” the venerable exsenator Rene Saguisag reacted:

“I am one of those who voted for PNoy in 2010 and Grace Poe in 2013. No violence, virtually, and no delay. I was convinced there was cheating in Bacoor and in Biliran, though. One problem could be you talk way, way above our heads so there is no or widespread national outrage, unlike in 1978 and 1986. I am just a simple lawyer. You have your work cut out for you. We share the same hope and dream that we have clean and credible elections in 2016 and beyond. The bigger pix is widespread poverty. Many poor people can be bought, manipulated, etc.”

Point well taken, po. Let this simple writer try again. Here goes:

Comelec still tied to PCOS

The Supreme Court has halted by 15-0 vote the secretly wrongfully negotiated P270-million diagnosis-for-defects of 82,000 old PCOS units. So the Comelec is now rushing a “proper” public bidding of such diagnostics. It threw in the needed repairs and parts replacements, so the total is now P1.2 billion, provided only less than four percent are defective. To the 82,000 refurbished units the Comelec intends to add 23,000 new ones, by lease of P2.5 billion.

If more than four percent need major repairs, then all 82,000 will be discarded – the P15 billion used for it lost in just two elections in 2010 and 2013. In that case, to the 23,000 new leased PCOS, the Comelec will add 71,000 more, upping the total to P14 billion.

In short, the Comelec is bent on reusing and reacquiring PCOS, even if too expensive.

PCOS inaccurate, opaque

There are worse problems with the PCOS:

• It is of questionable accuracy. Never in 2010 and 2013 did it pass the automation law’s requirement of 99.995-percent accuracy, not in the pre-balloting public demos or the post-balloting random manual audits. The 99.995 percent means only one mistake for every 20,000 ballot marks. At best the PCOS was 95 percent, a good grade in school but which in elections means tens of millions of miscounted votes.

• Too, the PCOS lacks transparency. Supplier Smartmatic Corp. has never submitted the source code, or specific program software, six months before Election Day. Six months is the minimum time needed by computer programmers to review around 250,000 lines of computer commands. The Comelec and the machine supplier Smartmatic want us to just take their word for it that the PCOS works just fine.

• Since the PCOS is inaccurate and opaque, its count is incredible. That’s according to three multi-term past and present presidents of the Philippine Computer Society and the deans of the Info-Tech departments of the Ateneo, De La Salle, and University of the Philippines. If the experts say we can’t trust the PCOS, who are we computer-illiterates to say otherwise?

Secret count, non-transmissions

We never see if the PCOS truly counts our votes. All it does when we feed the ballot is display the programmed message, “Congratulations, you have blah-blah-blah.” Our ballot supposedly is tallied with the 600 to 1,000 others in the precinct cluster. But everything is hidden. Secret balloting no longer means secrecy of choice; it has come to mean secret counting.

The precinct tally is then transmitted to the municipal or city hall, provincial capitol, and national center. In 2013 at least 23 percent of the tallies were not transmitted. Then-Comelec chairman Sixto Brillantes blamed the telecoms companies for it, but the info-technologists there knew better: the PCOS fouled up.

Lastly, that tally is canvassed (consolidated) with the hundreds of thousands of other local (mayoral, gubernatorial, congressional, etc.) and tens of millions of other national (presidential, senatorial) votes. But we never see this too. The required post- balloting random manual audits of 2010 and 2013 failed. The Comelec says there’s a digital image of every ballot in the PCOS that swallowed it. Yet instead of proving the veracity of the digital images and the canvasses, the Comelec, especially during Brillantes’ tenure, has sued every judge that allowed a manual recount even if not in election protest but only to find out the truth.

Familiarity with automation

If we email somebody, we see what we type on the keyboard. When we send it, we can BCC (blank carbon copy) ourselves, for our files. And the recipient can save our email for his own files. There’s a documentation trail. It’s automated inputting, transmission, and receiving – but transparent, so credible.

When we withdraw by ATM (automated teller machine), we secretly punch in the amount of transaction, like secret balloting, then carefully count the cash spat out, like public counting. We get the transaction receipt for our files, so the bank has no way of lessening our balance without our knowing, like publicly verifiable consolidation or canvassing. Again it’s all automated, but fraud if any is detectable.

No security features

Not so with elections using PCOS. There’s no ultraviolet light to detect fake un-watermarked ballots. There are no exclusive digital signatures (passwords) so that only the three members of the precinct cluster Board of Election Inspectors can start up the PCOS, and later press the “tally” and “transmit” buttons. There is no review by private or political party info-technologists of the source code that prompts the PCOS to swallow (or reject unwanted) ballots; tally the national, senatorial, regional ( Muslim Mindanao), congressional, provincial, city, municipal, and district races; transmit to the right local center; and canvass at that local and the national center. It’s so unlike the email and ATM software programs that periodically are even improved for accuracy and transparency. And those are just three of the more than three-dozen major flaws of the PCOS, according to I-T experts.

Because opaque the PCOS is prone to fraud, especially internal manipulation by Comelec- Smartmatic technicians. And the absence of basic security features makes such fraud easier. So what happened in 2013? The PCOS was not even fast. Elections were on May 13, but transmission clogged until early June. The parallel count by the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV), which as official watchdog- NGO ran the Comelec’s Transparency Server, was never finished. The canvassing was fraudulent.

Details on Wednesday

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