Doing the right thing EDITORIAL 05/21/2010

Doing the right thing

EDITORIAL Click to enlarge 05/21/2010 Speaker Prospero Nograles plans to file a suit against the Commission on Elections (Comelec), Smartmatic, some Board of Election Inspectors and the National Printing Office for election sabotage. He really should go ahead and do it, mainly because Comelec has been getting away with election murder, year after election year. And worse, the Comelec commissioners are allowing Smartmatic to get away with electoral murder, too. No matter how much they deny it, the fact is that there was fraud that marked the 2010 presidential polls, and the fact too, is that the Comelec has been much too remiss in ensuring that the polls would be fraud-free, taking away all the anti-fraud security measures, refusing to allow a source code review by other IT experts, including the political party representatives, and even having all the flash cards for the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines changed, without any independent witness or political party representatives. At the congressional hearing Wednesday, neither the Comelec commissioners and the Comelec executive director, nor, for that matter, Smartmatic officials, answered the questions posed by the congressmen satisfactorily and credibly. For instance, in the case of the whistleblower who appeared in a video tape, alleging fraud consisting of some 15 million votes, Comelec, and even the committee chairman, laughed off the claims, saying that a masked man can’t be trusted. Maybe. But the point is not to trust or distrust the whistleblower, but to dig deeper into the allegations and this they refuse to do. But putting that video taped allegations of automated fraud aside, there certainly were pieces of evidence that showed different dates of the election returns (ERs). Just what did the Comelec and Smartmatic officials claim? The time posted in these ERs was not important, they said yet this was very important, since it is the posted time when the machines should have transmitted the votes to the server of the Comelec, claimed to be secured.... MORE   Source:  The Daily Tribune URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20100521com1.html

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