Two senators on Friday urged the Commission on Elections to first thoroughly review the automated election system employed in the May 10 elections and correct all the defects before deciding to use precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines in the next polls.
"Before Comelec uses PCOS again, all defects must be corrected first. Otherwise we will used as guinea pigs again," Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel Jr. said in a text message to GMANews.TV.
Pimentel said the automated election system (AES) used in the recent polls left a long trail of deficiencies that must be cured if the next elections will be automated again.
However, he hastened to add that such automation glitches did not suffice to nullify the electoral exercise.
In a separate text message, Senator Francis Escudero said it is more prudent to finish all post-election review and analysis to improve the AES before using it again.
“I am sure that it can still be improved a lot more. It was surely better than manual but with many imperfections. These imperfections must be weeded out before deciding to use it again," he said.
On Thursday, Comelec Commissioner Gregorio Lararazabal said it would be better to use the PCOS machines because the voters are already familiar with them.
Pimentel, in a press statement issued Friday, said the PCOS machines were not completely reliable and were tainted by certain anomalies.
He decried that voters were denied the right to know how and if the votes they had cast for their chosen candidates were duly recorded by the PCOS machines.
“The paper trail that I, as a lawmaker, was assured would be available for that purpose, never materialized in any of the election machines used all over the country. All that came out of the PCOS machines was an inane, silly and childish message that said: ‘Congratulations! You have successfully voted’," he said.
These observations and evaluations on the conduct of the automated polls were contained in Pimentel’s report as a member of the joint committee of the l4th Congress that canvassed the votes for the presidential and vice presidential candidates.
Pimentel noted that there were several certificates of canvass electronically sent to the national canvassing and consolidation server (CCS) that contained data errors. Strictly speaking, he said, those mistakes should have resulted in the nullification of the votes enumerated in the certificates.
Citing the analyses of information technology experts, he said the errors and deficiencies of the AES could be blamed on the lack or the disabling of safeguards that should have been built into the PCOS machines, as required by the AES law.
For instance, he said that the Philippine Computer Society found out that a number of devices or “compensating controls" were not installed in the voting machines to enable them to function with a 99.995-percent accuracy.
These compensating controls were listed down by the U.S.-based Systest Lab which tested the PCOS machines, and were supposedly certified by a technical evaluation committee of the Commission on Elections.
“Small wonder that Ambassador Tita de Villa, head of the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) reported to the Joint National Canvassing Board that on the average the errors recorded by the PCOS machines was .007 percent, not .005 percent that was demanded by the contract between Smartmatic, the PCOS machines provider and the Comelec, the government agency in charge of ensuring orderly, clean and honest automated elections in the country," Pimentel said.
Commenting on the erroneous dates on the closure of the polls inscribed on some COCs transmitted to Congress, Pimentel said this indicated that the PCOS machines could have been tampered with or that the machines simply committed errors that corrupted the documents.
For example, he said that in Bacolod City, copies of the canvass reports from precincts in the city stated that the polls closed on Jan. l8, 2010. In Manila, there were election returns that bore the dates April 28, May 4 and May 9, indicating they were prepared and transmitted even before elections were held.
Pimentel cited the interpretation of Philippine Computer Society director Edmundo Casino on the inaccurate date and time stamped on the election returns:
“The only plausible explanation for this (anomaly) is that some cloned or similar PCOS device were used for scanning counterfeit ballots printed elsewhere in some clandestine areas so that the erroneous number of votes of the candidates for local or national positions on the dates and times shown in the election returns were recorded and captured as if they were genuinely ‘original’ in the compact flash memory card. And possibly during election day, the CF card bearing the pre-scanned and pre-counted results could have been switched with unused and real CF card."
Pimentel also criticized the Comelec and Smartmatic for the following missteps:
1. The arbitrary removal of security safeguards like the digital signatures of the members of the Board of Election Inspectors, which were supposed to accompany the electronically-sent canvass reports from the provinces and the cities.
2. The disabling of the ultraviolet (UV) reader in the PCOS machines intended for detecting security markings in the official ballots.
3. The non-obligatory use of 76,000 portable UV lamps that were purchased at a cost of P30 million.
4. The non-audit of CF cards which contained instructions for the PCOS machines to read entries in the ballots.
5. The failure or delay in conducting random manual audit of election results as mandated by the AES law.
6. The failure to follow a ladderized system for transmitting election results.
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