The danger of automated polls FRONTLINE Ninez Cacho-Olivares 06/09/2010

The danger of automated polls

FRONTLINE Ninez Cacho-Olivares 06/09/2010 That there was electronic fraud can hardly be denied. The automated system failed. And even the Commission on Elections (Comelec) officials, especially Executive Director Jose Tolentino and Commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal, weren’t giving out the right answers and were pretty evasive, evidently in a move to protect themselves and Smartmatic. What’s done is done. What we now have are digitally elected leaders, and as Homobono Adaza put it, it was not the Filipino people who voted for their candidates and leaders, but the PCOS (precinct count optical scan) machines of Smartmatic. All signs point to the nation having been duped by the automated machines and through the many sins committed by the Comelec officials and Smartmatic, none of whom were ever transparent with the Filipino people — even today. It was admitted by Smartmatic at a congressional committee hearing which ended yesterday that ballots could be rescanned and the data stored in the same compact flash (CF) card. What guarantee then is there that the rescanned ballots and data were not faked? Then too, the electronic fraud was pretty clear in that while the electronically transmitted certificates of canvass (CoCs) were submitted, no statement of votes (SoVs) were included. There were more irregularities, glossed over by the canvassing board. Yet there was Tolentino and Larrazabal claiming that the SoV data were still stored in the machine, and that these could not be printed because there were too many precincts and to print the SoV would take months, as these were 10,000 pages. Who buys that story?  So candidates were proclaimed on the basis of what could be fake CoCs, since fake ballots can be rescanned and data altered in the same CF cards. It has been found that votes can be manipulated in favor of a certain candidate with the Board of Election Inspectors (BEIs) manipulative ways.... MORE     Source:  The Daily Tribune URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20100609com2.html

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