When is it “some sort of lapse” and when is it gross dereliction of duty bordering on the criminal.

I’m asking myself this question after hearing COMELEC  Chairman Jose Melo’s ill-chosen joke that “maybe we should just use banana leaves to save money instead of the ‘vote securiy folders’ priced as P380 per piece.”

At the risk of being cited for contempt, I now most seriously doubt if those guys at the COMELEC realize that apart from being guardians of the elections, they are sworn to prudently use taxpayer money.

My doubt, nay, anger stems from the cavalier posture of Chairman Melo and his Bidding And Awards Committee and its lame defense the it’s reasonable to pay P380 each for 1,8-M pieces of blue plastic folders for ‘bargain’ price of P690-M

Chicken feed, right?

These people should be sent to the slammer.

After a public trial, of course, lest we be accused of violating their human rights.

Oh brother!!!

Not to worry.

That’s what  COMELEC Chairman Jose Melo is telling us yet again.

This is in the wake of the twin decisions of PLDT /Smart Telecoms and Globe Telecoms to back off from their earlier readiness to make their mission critical data processing centers in Makati as the mainframe vote data collection and processing hubs for the May 10.

The telcos are saying they’re worried about the data centers’ security.

The COMELEC’s kneejerk reaction?

Don’t worry we’ll just post phalanxes of policemen and soldiers to stand guard.

Out of respect, no guffaws were heard t the Senate hearing.

But the ‘honorable’ Mr. Melo’s cluelessness was abysmal!

The reference to the centers being secure was not only the physical aspect.

They need to be secure from cyber terrorist attacks, attacks that can compromise the integrity of the servers, and the data they hold!!

One need only recall the recent hacking of 5 government sites with the cybe criminals warning that they may target the servers of the COMELEC.

http://atmidfield.com/2010/01/11/the-2010-elections-under-threat-from-cyber-terrorists-and-vulnerable-voting-machines/

These dangers cannot be glossed over any longer.

Even the ‘presidentiables’ are waking up to the clear and present danger that civil society members have been warning about for months: that the elections can be vunverable to automated cheating or digital dagdag bawas.

Questions are also emerging about just how stable the Luzon power grid will be come election day.

Energy officials are giving the tongue-in-cheek assurance that Luzon has 1,000 megawatts of excess generating capacity.

Don’t be fooled.

Energy sector experts know only too well that 1,000 megawatts in reserve power IS THIN, given the configuration of the grid where the tripping on one plant normally triggers a chain reaction of other plant, and the grid itself tripping off to prevent serious system-wide damage.

Taking the threats to the vote data processing servers and the power grid together spells failure of election.

The poll body now says the alternative data centers offered by the two telcos are ok for use and so there’s really no worry about the hubs beinf physically attacked.

The sites’ location, says COMELEC will not be made public and known only to partners like the Parish Pastoral Council for responsible voting.

No word about whether the political parties ill be told where the vote result tallies will be ‘processed’.

Given ‘immense public trust’ for the COMELEC and how it has practically outsourced its constitutional mandate of managing the election this secrecy stunt raises new doubys about the lack of transparency in this sovereign exercise!

The COMELEC’s nonchalant  ‘what me worry stance’ is unacceptable.

Any mass media columnist, commentator, announcer, reporter, on-air correspondent, or personality who is a candidate for any elective public office, or is a campaign volunteer for or employed or retained in any capacity by any candidate, political party, or party-list group, or organization, and/or coalition thereof, shall be deemed resigned, if so required by their employer, or shall take a leave of absence from his/her work as such during the campaign period; Provided, that after he has filed his certificate of candidacy but before the campaign period, it shall be his obligation not to use his media work for premature election campaign or partisan political activity: Provided, finally, that any media practitioner who is an official of a political party or a member of the campaign staff of a candidate, political party, or party-list group, organization, and/or coalition thereof, shall not use his/her time or space to favor any candidate, political party, or party-list group, organization, and/or coalition thereof;

As sociologist Randy David pointed out in his Philippine Daily Inquirer column, the law, whatever its merits, is highly ambiguous, as “it is trying to cover in one paragraph a broad range of individuals and activities that are qualitatively different from one another“. How, for instance, is “campaign volunteer” to be defined? What about “mass media personality”? Does the law apply both to talents and to regular employees (the position taken by GMA-7), or just regular employees (the interpretation favored by ABS-CBN)? (More details on the reactions of the TV networks and individual celebrities may be found here.)

Compounding the confusion is the lack of consensus among the Comelec commissioners themselves, as revealed in the Philippine Star: Rene Sarmiento said that the law generally applies to politicians who are themselves involved in showbiz, Gregorio Larrazabal claimed that a close examination of the law would show that media personalities are not actually required to take a leave, and Nicodemo Ferrer declared that the poll body would come up with (additional?) rules for the purpose of clarification.

Amid this morass of conflicting opinions, it is of interest to note that, among the various political camps, the ruling party, Lakas-Kampi CMD, is alone in its approval of the Comelec resolution. Prospero Pichay, the campaign manager for the senatorial candidates of the administration, stated that the playing field would now be level as far as television was concerned, while Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) secretary Ronaldo Puno took it one step further, saying that such a leveling would favor Gilbert Teodoro, who has been faring miserably in the presidential race, if the periodic surveys of the electorate are any indication.

It is undeniable that Teodoro has few celebrity endorsers—a consequence of the copyright infringement brouhaha involving former Rivermaya front-man Rico Blanco, perhaps?—but Pichay, Puno, and their ilk would do well to remember that their candidate enjoys the signal privilege of being practically endorsed by a nationally distributed broadsheet, The Manila Times, in its editorials. This means that the administration candidate is not supported merely by a columnist or two, which is the case for other candidates, but by an entire publication that reaches hundreds of thousands of readers daily.

As early as October of last year, in the wake of Ondoy, the Times hailed Teodoro, then secretary of the Department of National Defense (DND) and head of the National Disaster Coordinating Council (NDCC), for “an excellent job coordinating the rescue and relief efforts”, describing the disaster as a test that Teodoro passed “with grace and humility”. (I have shown elsewhere—and, to my mind, very convincingly—how preposterous such claims are.)

In December, the newspaper once more sung the praises of Teodoro:

Teodoro is a welcome presence in the political arena. Humble and self effacing, he speaks in measured and moderate tones. Foregoing bombast and oratory, he delivers well-organized, well-reasoned thoughts and statements on the issues. He refuses to stoop to personalities and mudslinging, preferring to speak on the issues, policies and the nitty-gritty of good governance.

If we read his mind, Teodoro could become the first bipartisan president in Philippine history. He could walk across the aisles to enlist the best minds in the opposition to join his government. He will cast a wider net to recruit nonparty members who share his core values and passion for public service.

Teodoro could also reach out to promising young men, women, ethnic leaders and reformed communists to join his government. He might make history by appointing naturalized Filipinos as key Palace aides. A Cabinet, after all, must be a mirror of the nation. It should include the principal members of the national family.

A government under President Teodoro could seek -peace with the communists and put an end to the New People’s Army insurgency. The next Malacañang resident could exert efforts to sign a peace agreement with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. President Teodoro will pursue a dialogue with all restive members of society—the rightists, the left-of-center and Church activists—in the name of reconciliation. But he will draw the line on terrorism and the Abu Sayyaf predators.

To give a final example, just last month, the Times seized upon a pastoral statement of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) and turned it into an opportunity to fawn over Teodoro yet again:

Gilbert Teodoro is “winnable” even if current surveys do not indicate so. His ratings have risen in recent weeks and should pick up as the campaign formally starts and as more Filipinos get to know more about his integrity, character and competitive edge over his opponents.

Our fate is not in the stars or in the surveys but in ourselves—this is the message of the CBCP pastoral letter. By voting wisely, we get the President we deserve, the leader we need.

That the Times has all but explicitly announced that it backs Teodoro should be no surprise, of course, as it is owned by Dante A. Ang, formerly personal publicist to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, and currently a member of Cabinet, serving as the chairman of the Commission on Filipinos Overseas.

Notwithstanding the bewilderment and outrage that Resolution No. 8758 has caused, the Comelec seems determined to enforce it immediately and to the letter, considering that legal division chief Ferdinand Rafanan has threatened to file criminal cases against celebrities who endorse any candidate during the official campaign period but fail to take a leave of absence or resign from their jobs. If the Comelec wishes to demonstrate that it is serious about the implementation of the resolution, however shaky the legal grounds, then it could do no better than order The Manila Times to shut down. Should it fail to do so, but insist on cracking down on other entities and individuals, the Comelec will only reinforce the already prevalent perception that it is not, in fact, an independent body, but merely one of the many playthings at the disposal of our hardworking and prayerful iconoclast of a president.

The nefarious practice of voters-for-hire a.k.a flying voters is alive and well despite the use of biometrics in the registration of voters and the upcoming automated elections.

The COMELEC says it has uncovered more than 300,000 double registrants or voters who registered at least twice for the 2010 elections.

Comelec Commissioner Rene Sarmiento says the agency’s barangay affairs and information and technology departments discovered the multiple registrants after auditing biometrics records of some 10 million registered voters in the National Capital Region, Autonomous Region for Muslim Mindanao, Central Luzon and Calabarzon.

It was further discovered that 43,902 individuals were daring enough to register multiple times, with some of the voters possibly using the old style of addresses.

The flying voters are obviously not at all worried by the prospect of being jailed from 1 to 6 years if convicted of their crime.

Why not since  such a slap on the wrist is nothing since first offenders would fall under the probation law?!?!

We must concemn and act against brazen attempt to undermine even the digital voter listing system has to be seen in the wider context of our elections being continually bastardized, and public will being thwarted by the cheaters and their corrupt political patrons.

t

(Screenshot of hacked TESDA web site)

This report cannot be taken lightly: the hacking, and defacement of a 5^th government website:

Hackers of the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (Tesda) Web site, however, took on a bolder approach by leaving a message that seemed to mock the upcoming automated elections.

“Ano ba gagamitin sa Election? Blade server? Juniper Firewall (what is going to be used in the elections? Blade server? Juniper firewall)?” the message read.

Before Tesda’s, hackers had also victimized the Web sites of the Department of Health (DOH), Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), National Disaster Coordinating Council (NDCC), and Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE).

The hacked Tesda Web site also showed a black and white illustration of a man giving the “dirty finger” supposedly directed against several “abusive” military and police units.

A pair of bulging eyeballs also followed the pointer anywhere on the page, and background music was also set up on the site’s second web page to which it automatically transfers.

Aside from the derisive reference to the May elections, message of sympathy to a slain communist rebel and a potshot against an alleged abusive police officer also replaced the original contents of the site.

http://www.gmanews.tv/story/181239/hackers-deface-5th-govt-web-site-mock-automated-polls

Deputy presidential spokesman Gary Olivar :

Of course we are concerned. This is not just a problem in our country, this is not just something that has happened just recently, it’s happening all over the country so this is certainly something that we are sensitive to as a matter of information policy within government,.

For the first time I agree with Mr. Olivar.

The aspiring geek that I am, this writer employs an off the shelf site and internet surfing protection suite and previous visits to the Malacanang site had identified it as an ‘unsafe site’ while also having firewalls protecting access to my own system and website.

Given the larger and certainly more critical roles of the government site, one wonders how the government’s own computer infrastructure is protected at all not just from hacking but cyber terrorism.

Don’t doubt it: the five attacks on the government websites are just test missions.

The hackers of the TESDA site did not only deface it. they dubious also made the site automatically jump into a second page, which featured a background music and job announcement supposedly from VenturesLink, one of the partners of Smartmatic-TIM in the automation of the elections

I’m sure Malacanang and COMELEC must now realize what’s up: a direct threat to the all-important servers for the automated election being made to crash resulting not just in failure in the transmission of mission-critical election data, the tallies plus back-end information.

Yes, that’s what we are looking at: the failure of elections.

The Commission on Elections (COMELEC), on Tuesday declared former Governor Benjamin Dy the rightful winner of the 2007 Isabela Elections for governor, and ordered Governor Grace Padaca to vacate the position immediately.

The almost two and a half year recount finally ended with former Governor Dy winning by just a margin of around 1,051 votes. In COMELEC’s 2007 results where Gov. Padaca was declared the winner of Dy, the results were not as close, as Gov. Padaca won by a margin of around 17,000 votes.

It was only last year that former Governor Dy chose to file an election fraud protest with the COMELEC, accusing Padaca’s camp of padding their vote count and further accused that the votes were filled up by just one person with thousands of ballots allegedly all having the same handwriting. Gov. Padaca has denied this and has stated unequivocally that for years, it was the Dy’s that had resorted to cheating.

In the final recount, more votes were shaved off of Gov. Padaca’s total count than was deducted from Benjamin Dy’s vote count, and thus yielded the closer margin and overturning the 2007 election results in favor of Dy.

THE SUDDEN REVIVAL OF ELECTION PROTESTS

The sudden revival of three election protests all involving Liberal Party candidates and/or supporters has many worried that this is indeed a political move, which Commissioner Nicodemo Ferrer of COMELEC has denied. It was just last December 1 where LP candidate and former KAMPI party member, Bulacan Governor Joselito Mendoza was also unseated favoring Roberto Pagdanganan who is currently with Lakas-KAMPI-CMD. With Gov. Padaca’s removal and unseating, this will be the second in just this month that LP has lost two of its Governors to recounts.

Furthermore, Ferrer indicated that there would be another surprise coming next week as they may be ready to decide the fate of former Gov. Lilia Pineda’s protest against Pampanga Governor Among Ed Panlilio’s win in the 2007 elections. Gov. Ed Panlilio has also publicly supported the candidacy of LP Presidential Candidate Noynoy Aquino.

with reports from GMANews.tv, Inquirer.net

The COMELEC Second Division however I believe became more Catholic than the Pope.  By denying Ang Ladlad’s petition for accreditation it used the “protection of morality argument”. The question is should the COMELEC be in the business of protecting people’s morals or should they be more in the protection of ballots? Also the decision even to a non-lawyer is violative of the non-Establishment of Religion clause in our Bill of Rights.  The decision clearly favours Christianity and Islam and is protective of the belief system of the two faiths. Even if these two faiths consist the majority of the electorate’s religious affiliation, the State by virtue of the Constitution is required to be neutral with respect to religion.

If gays want to destroy the constitutional system of government, then COMELEC should not accredit it. If gays have in their platform a plan for liquidating straights in order to rule the planet, then COMELEC should not accredit it. But if gays want to participate in the electoral system and promote children’s rights, women’s rights and the right to an education (which is Ladlad’s platform) then they should not be a threat to anyone in our society at all. I recall Danton Remoto’s quip on  gay marriage. Danton said “No, magagalit si Jesus!” Our gay rights advocates seem to know their limits.

But if just being gay is a threat to society and the morals of the youth, then this is indeed disturbing. Because it implies that gays if only shut in their beauty parlor ghettos will be harmless to the rest of society.

Now back to the real morality argument. The Roman Church believes that homosexual orientation doesn’t violate any of the Ten Commandments. But it does believe that cheating in elections is a violation of 8th Commandment “Thou shalt not bear false witness on thy neighbour”

Since all the political parties in the Philippines trade allegations of cheating every election time and the COMELEC knows its morals, then it should not accredit all POLITICAL PARTIES.

I like Hillary Clinton’s description of corruption as ‘corrosive”. The United States electorate does take seriously allegations of poll cheating because it undermines the basis of their democracy which is based on a Judaeo-Christian  understanding of morality. However they to a large extent uphold a Secular understanding of this morality. An interpretation based on a religious viewpoint in the courts and government authorities is bound to generate a lot of freedom of religion suits.

The ruling elite in our society must be so oxidized by now!

So which is more corrosive to the youth? Being gay or cheating? I believe it is the latter. As for the former and since I teach in college, I know many of the youth are gay anyway. So why the need to protect them from gays? Let them be gay as long they don’t hurt anyone, or violate the law.

A computer program is a set of instructions that a computer follows to accomplish its task. Without a program, a computer is just a dumb chunk of metal and plastic. With a program the computer can help us browse the web, send and receive email, Skype our relatives abroad, format and print beautiful documents, and balance our household budget.

A program is written by a human computer programmer, using a human-readable programming language like C or Java. This version of the program written in some human-readable language is called source code. Although the source code can be read by humans, the computer can not execute source code. Source code needs to be translated into a computer-readable-executable version called machine code, the only language that the computer understands.

Here is an example of source code, written in the C programming language.

#include
int main(void)
{
printf(“Hello, world!\n”);
return 0;
}

And here is the equivalent machine code that the computer can execute. The first column is machine code, and the last two columns are English version of machine code

.section .rodata
.LC0:
48656C6C .string “Hello, world!”
6F2C2077
6F726C64
2100
.text
main:
8D4C2404 leal 4(%esp), %ecx
83E4F0 andl $-16, %esp
FF71FC pushl -4(%ecx)
55 pushl %ebp
89E5 movl %esp, %ebp
51 pushl %ecx
83EC04 subl $4, %esp
C7042400 movl $.LC0, (%esp)
000000
E8FCFFFF call puts
FF
B8000000 movl $0, %eax
00
83C404 addl $4, %esp
59 popl %ecx
5D popl %ebp
8D61FC leal -4(%ecx), %esp
C3 ret

The machine code is given in hexadecimal for convenience to the human reader, but in the computer, it is really binary, consisting entirely of zeroes and ones. For example, the hexadecimal instruction 89E5 (movl %esp,%ebp) is really the binary instruction 1000 1001 1110 0101 in the computer. For this reason, machine code is also called binary code.

Counting in Manual elections

The Omnibus Election Law tells us that counting of our votes has to be done in public, in full view of everyone. Section 206 states that,

“Counting to be public and without interruption. As soon as the voting is finished, the board of election inspectors (BEI) shall publicly count in the polling place the votes cast and ascertain the results. The board of election inspectors shall not adjourn or postpone or delay the count until it has been fully completed, unless otherwise ordered by the Commission (on Elections or COMELEC).”

As citizens, it is our right to know how our votes are counted. This right is an inalienable right, guarranteed by Section 7 of our Constitution,

“The right of the people to information on matters of public concern shall be recognized.”

Election is a matter of public concern, and we have a collective right to know how the votes on our ballots are counted. Thus the need for open and public counting.

Automated Election: Paper-Based Computerized Elections

The computerized election that COMELEC has chosen for May 10, 2010 makes use of substance 24 or thicker paper ballots of size 8.5″x30″. This ballot can hold the names of 300 national and local candidates’ names on one side and 300 party-list names on the reverse side. The voter marks the oval next to the candidate’s name of his choice using any one of the following marking styles: dot, check mark, cross mark, or full shade. When the voter has finished marking his choices, he feeds his ballot himself into the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) computer, which scans his ballot, saves the scanned image of the ballot as a TIFF file in the non-volatile static memory of the PCOS, together with its interpretation of the ballot. The PCOS decides which marks on the ballot are valid vote marks, based on guidelines specified by COMELEC, but ultimately based on its inherent capability to “see” the marks as defined by its scan resolution and scan depth.

Scan resolution defines how many dots the scanner can see per linear inch. Normal scanners can see 300 dots per inch, horizontally and vertically. Scan depth refers to how many shades of color can be associated with each dot. Normal scanners can see 24-bits of color per dot, corresponding to more than 16 millions shades of color. On the other hand, the scanner of the Smartmatic PCOS computer that COMELEC has selected has a scan resolution of 200 dots per inch, with depth of 4-bits and so can only see 16 shades of a single color – black. This is 16 only, not 16 million. The Smartmatic PCOS scanner is absolutely the most primitive scanner one can buy today, or not buy, because they are not even offered for sale in normal computer stores.

No matter how brilliant is the computer program of the PCOS, it will make mistakes in deciding which of the voter’s marks are valid votes and which are not, precisely because it can only “see” 16 shades of black and white. The ability to see only 16 shades would have been okay, if only the PCOS machine were required to show to the voter how it interpreted the voter’s ballot. But COMELEC will configure the PCOS machine to NOT show the PCOS interpretation to the voter, because of time limitations. It takes the PCOS 30 seconds to interpret each 8.5″x30″ ballot, and to require the PCOS to show its interpretation to the voter will add another 30 seconds, for a total voting time of one minute per voter. Since there will be 1000 voters per computerized precinct, at one minute voting time per voter, total voting time will be about 17 hours, which is not acceptable to COMELEC.

So in May, 2010, the voter will never know how the PCOS read his ballot, and how the PCOS added up all the votes to produce the precinct election return. With computerized counting using Smartmatic’s PCOS, the principle of public counting provided for in the Omnibus Election Law will never be realized.

Source Code Review

The framers of Republic Act 9369, the Amended Automated Election System (AES) Law, realizing that the process of computerized counting of vote marks on paper ballots will be done in secret by the computer, provided an alternative that may be acceptable as a substitute to public counting — source code review. If the source code of the program running on the PCOS computer can be reviewed by the community, then we will know how our vote marks are interpreted, how votes are assigned to the selected candidates, how votes are tallied, what data are saved for back up later, how the precinct ER EML file is generated, how it is digitally signed by the BEI, how the transmission to the municipal canvassing computer and other destinations is carried out, what details are placed in the audit logs and whether these details are sufficient, etc. With source code review conducted by people we trust, the computerized counting of votes, although carried out in secret by the PCOS computer, will be revealed to us, and so we can accept computerized counting as if it were public counting.

RA-9369 Section 14 states the urgency of source code review of the election programs as follows. “Once an AES technology is selected for implementation, the Commission shall promptly make the source code of that technology available and open to any interested political party or groups which may conduct their own review thereof.”

The point in time when the source code review should be done is clearly stated here: “once an AES technology is selected”. It does not say that source code review will be done after COMELEC signs the contract with Smartmatic. It does not say that source code review will be done after COMELEC makes a PHP3.0 billion down payment. It says, “once an AES technology is selected” by the Special Bids and Awards Committee (SBAC).

THE Terms of Reference provided by COMELEC to the participating bidders in the 2010 elections further confirms this in Section 7.4. “The winning bidder shall authorize COMELEC to make the final source code of the PCOS and CCS and all of its components available and open to any interested party or groups which may conduct their own code review thereof”. It says the “winning bidder”. It does not say the “winning bidder after signing the contract and after being paid the down payment”. It says the “winning bidder” period.

Manner of Source Code Review

During the hearing of the case “Harry Roque vs. COMELEC-Smartmatic”, the Supreme Court gave us an idea of how a source code review should be conducted when Justice Antonio Carpio, pronounced, “the COMELEC has to supply the political parties the source code for review. They have to take them home so that they can study them”. Justice Carpio knows how difficult it is to do a source code review, and that the correct way to do this is to allow the political parties to take the source code home, so that their programmers can take the code apart to understand what it is doing, study the code as individuals and in programmer groups, discuss the code with the political leaders, discuss the code in their organizations and special interest groups, discuss the code as widely as possible. This is the only way that you can convince people that the selected technology will do the job right, so that people can accept the secret counting that the PCOS will do.

The Filipino can read source code. A great number of us can do so, as evidenced by an ever increasing number of enrollment in IT related courses, from 220,000 in 1999 to 270,000 in 2004. Even grade school students learn to program in school, using LOGO or Basic. High school students learn programming in Basic, C, or Java, and some even program their own websites.

However, the COMELEC wants the political parties to do the source code review under conditions and terms agreed upon between COMELEC and Smartmatic, telling people that COMELEC has to respect the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) of Smartmatic. The contract signed by COMELEC and Smartmatic specifies in Article 7.2, “The system software, hardware, and source code, including documentation will be open for inspection at any time in a controlled environment under guidelines formulated and agreed by both parties”. And in Article 9.5, “The PROVIDER (Smartmatic) and COMELEC shall promptly make the source code of the Project available and open to any interested political party or groups which may conduct their own review thereof … in accordance with the provisions of Article 7.2 above”.

As a computer programmer, I must violently disagree to a source code review under controlled environment, because that is not in the spirit of “an interested political party or group conducting their own review thereof”.

Richard Stallman is the founder of the Free Software Foundation, advocate of the freedom to study source code in order to make improvements to the program, and author of the software copyright called the General Public License (GPL). When I mentioned to him that the COMELEC wanted to protect the IPR of Smartmatic, he said, “IPR is just a vague way of talking about various different laws, so talking about it is just handwaving. If they (COMELEC and Smartmatic) claim that some law restricts this review, they have an obligation to say WHICH law they are talking about. Then you can look at that law and make arguments about what it really requires in this case”. So I now ask COMELEC, which Philippine law is violated if source code review is done in the manner specified by Justice Carpio? I tell COMELEC now that it may be violating the provision of RA-9369 Section 14 and its own Terms of Reference if it does not allow review as Justice Carpio specified.

COMELEC Advisory Council – Enemy of the People

In the document “Post-election Report on the Use of Automated Election System (AES) in the 2008 ARMM Elections”, the COMELEC Advisory Council (CAC) recommended to the Congressional Oversight Committee the following change in legislation, in RA-9369 to remove “source code review” and replace it with “review of the instructions/users’ manual”. So the CAC wants to remove from the AES Law the only measure that will make people believe in the correctness of the computer count. The fact that COMELEC did not do a source code review in the ARMM elections can be forgiven. But for the CAC to recommend a new law that prevents us from “our constitutional right to know” is treason. The present membership of the CAC, if they have any honor left in them, should all resign, and should be replaced by people in their respective agencies who will do a better job.

The recommendation to remove “source code review” from RA-9369 arises out of the CAC’s ignorance of computer technology, an area in which all of them are supposed to be experts. In the Report, the CAC mentioned that “source code” refers to “system software codes of computer programs that may be subjected to alterations causing widespread fraud at a grand scale”. First, the subject of source code review is the election application program, the SAES-1800 scanning and counting program, not the system software which is either Windows or Linux. The operating system software, if Linux, has been downloaded and reviewed by thousands of people, and so does not need to be reviewed. Second, the act of doing a source code review of the SAES program will not subject the SAES to “alterations causing widespread fraud at a grand scale”. To alter the program running on any computer, you need to have physical or network access to the computer, and the program must be alterable. Only Smartmatic and COMELEC will have physical possession of the PCOS machines before election, which they will keep under lock and key, so physical access is out of the story. The PCOS computer will connect to the Internet at the close of polls on election day, and for a few minutes only, in order to transmit its precinct election return to the canvassing computers, so network access is extremely difficult. The PCOS program must be alterable, but it is not, since it is burned in computer firmware. So how can any criminal computer cracker gain access to the PCOS machine for the purpose of altering the PCOS program? Unless, it is an inside job within Smartmatic or COMELEC.

Is Smartmatic Allowed to Supply the Source Code?

The owner of a software program (copyright holder) can license his program for use by other people. The license can be of two kinds: (1) a binary license is a permission to use the binary code or machine code on a computer. (2) a source license is a permission to use the binary code on a computer, together with a copy of the source code, which the licensee is allowed to read and study. The source license may further specify whether the source code may be modified by the licensee, and what mechanism the licensee must follow to implement his modifications. Is the Smartmatic PCOS program owned by Smartmatic, or Smartmatic just a licensee of another company?

A reading of the License Agreement presented by Smartmatic to COMELEC, which is a public document whose contents the people has the right to know, shows the following. The PCOS computer hardware and software/firmware are owned by Dominion Voting Systems of Canada. On April 4, 2009, Smartmatic licensed this technology from Dominion for a period of five years, “with the right to sublicense the right to use such software to the COMELEC”, but that “Dominion will retain sole liability to amend, change or develop all software or firmware or EMS”.

It is clear from this document that Smartmatic’s license is a binary license, and Smartmatic has never been authorized to get the source code from the very beginning, nor is it authorized to modify the source code in any way. When Smartmatic joined the COMELEC bidding to supply computer equipment, management, and training for Election 2010, it had full knowledge that it could not meet the provision of RA-9369 Section 14, which states “Once an AES technology is selected for implementation, the Commission shall promptly make the source code of that technology available and open to any interested political party or groups which may conduct their own review thereof”. Since COMELEC is a sublicensee of Smartmatic, which in turn is a licensee of Dominion, with only a binary license, COMELEC could not fulfill this sacred duty of source code review in an environment in which “political parties may conduct their own review”, because there is no source code to review.

Is Smartmatic liable under Philippine laws for its misrepresentations of facts? Is COMELEC, under advice from the CAC, fooling the People?

Pablo Manalastas, PhD, is a lecturer in computer science at Ateneo de Manila and University of the Philippines. He is a computer programmer, and he coached the Ateneo programming team that went to the two World Finals, 2005 Shanghai and 2006 San Antonio, of the prestigious ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. He is a research fellow of the Center for People Empowerment in Governance.

Are we headed for a repeat of the graft-ridden election nearly a decade ago that saw someone who sounded like Gloria Macapagal Arroyo phoning  elections commissioner Virgilio Garcillano about assuring a one million-vote lead in the 2004 election?

That  ‘Hello-Garci’ episode, immortalized in cellphone ringtones and YouTube parody video blogs, comes to mind in the wake of the fears being expressed by the Commission on Elections that it may be forced to declare a failure in its bidding for an Automated Election System.

This following the disqualification of all seven joint venture firms that participated in the process.

The only remaining aspect in the precarious scenario at the COMELEC is how it will rule on the reconsideration bids it has encouraged the DQ’d bidders to submit

If the bidding does fail next year’s elections will again be manual with all the attendant dangers of fraud: dagdag-bawas,  stolen ballot boxes, faked election returns and canvasses.

The end-result  would be the most dire: the installation of yet another president with a questioned mandate along with equally bogus senators, congressmen, and hey, the whole caboodle of local officials.

We would then be staring as the very destruction of the electoral system that underpins our republican democracy.

There is a pressing issue that I think the Philippine cyberspace should discuss and this is the computerization of 2010 elections. We are going to spend around 8 billion pesos in LEASING counting machines for 12 hours without the assurance that the data generated by these machines are genuine.

Safeguarding the 2010 Elections with Digital Signatures

Pablo Manalastas, PhD
Department of Information Systems & Computer Science
Ateneo de Manila University, Katipunan Avenue, Quezon City 1108

April 2009

President GMA has just signed the 11.4 billion peso supplemental budget that will enable the full computerization of the May 10, 2010 national and local elections. The Commission on Elections (Comelec), in turn, has published the terms of reference or “Request for Proposal 2010 Elections Automation Project” (RFP) which will guide the vendors in their bids to supply computer and communications equipment, election software, training of Comelec personnel, and management of the entire election process.

The amount of 11.4 billion pesos is not a small amount of money, and is probably the biggest budget for an IT project ever undertaken in the entire IT history of the Philippines. Why the important players like computerIT companies, communications companies, software houses, government IT agencies, the academe, and local computer organizations, were not consulted in the design of this allimportant IT project is incomprehensible. Even more incomprehensible is why an IT person was not appointed to the Comelec at a time when the Comelec needed an IT expert among its commissioners.

All preparations have been made, no matter how inadequate, and Comelec will push through with fully computerized 2010 elections. All that we can do is be vigilant and make sure that Comelec does not squander its humongous budget.

Please read the complete paper in PDF: safeguarding 2010 elections

COMELEC’S Poll Automation Will Make Fraud More Dangerous

When at most 70 percent of some 50 million voters go to the polls on May 10, 2010, they won’t be able to track how their votes are counted or canvassed. Winners in the national and local elections led by a new president will be declared two or three days after – and the whole nation will be at a loss in knowing whether the election results are real. Protests may probably be hard to file not only because of a lack of paper trail but also for lack of time.

….Poll automation feeds the wrong impression to the public that elections will be clean and credible. Because it is a machine, it is powerless against any fraud that takes place before, during, and after the elections. And, because it is just a machine, it is vulnerable to human intervention such as software attack,
glitches, and other technical problems that could result in wholesale electronic cheating.

Please read the full paper in PDF: COMELEC’s Poll Automation…