Doubts linger despite Smartmatic AES demo
By Gerry Baldo and Charlie V. Manalo 06/01/2010 Neither the many congressmen who went to the Smartmatic plant in Sta. Rosa, Cabuyao, for a testing of the precint count optical scan (PCOS) machines under controlled surroundings, nor the camp of former President Joseph Estrada were impressed or convinced that the automated election system, as programmed by Smartmatic, has yielded accurate results, and was fraud-free. A congressional source who witnessed the demonstration in Cabuyao told the Tribune that the demonstration hardly proved anything, even if it was admitted that the four compact flash (CF) cards in the possession of the Parish Pastoral Council or Responsible Voting (PPCRV) taken from the junkyard in Cagayan de Oro, were genuine. “What we were given was a demonstration of the system under controlled conditions. It was in their (Smartmatic) warehouse. Their technicians were there to operate the system. They (Smarmatic officials) tell us that while one can edit the CF cards, once edited, the machine will no longer accept the card and data from this CF card can no longer be transmitted.“But it should be remembered that Smartmatic controls everything, which means that they could have easily changed the programming of the machines beforehand, to show exactly that which they wanted to show us,” the sources said. The camp of former President Joseph Estrada, meanwhile, made it clear it is not convinced the machines and the automated system are fraud free, even with a demonstration made by Smartmatic officials amid claims that the recent automated elections were foolproof. Lawyer Boy imperial, one of Estrada’s lawyers, said that while Smartmatic proved that the PCOS machines would not be able to transmit another election return after another transmission, it bolstered the claim of “Koala Boy” that his group had transmitted ER’s ahead of the genuine ER that should have come from the precincts. Imperial also said that Smartmatic failed to explain in full the “command instructions for the PCOS machines on how the votes for a particular candidate should be counted. “While they had shown that the PCOS machines had refused to transmit an ER after an earlier ER has been transmitted, the allegations raised by Koala Boy could still be relevant,” Imperial said yesterday after the House committee on suffrage conducted an ocular inspection of Smartmatic’s warehouse in Cabuyao, Laguna. Imperial also said that Smartmatic had refused to show the “log” of all the transmissions that the Smartmatic server had received during the election. It had also refused to provide all interested parties the images of all the ballots captured by the CF cards. “The coordinates for each of the candidates were not also shown,” Imperial said. A “coordinate” is the exact place of name and the adjacent oval space that has to be shaded. Source: The Daily Tribune URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/headlines/20100601hed1.html |
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