Not so fast, smartass! DIE HARD III Herman Tiu Laurel 05/17/2010

Not so fast, smartass!

DIE HARD III Herman Tiu Laurel 05/17/2010 Along with Smartmatic, the Comelec and PPCRV, mainstream media clearly tried to pull a fast one on the public last week when they declared the automated election system (AES) a massive success, which speed had “stunned the nation” as headlined by one newspaper. Its even ballyhooed on its Web edition its star columnist when he declared himself a convert, from an automated election skeptic to a believer in the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) system. But just two days after election day, after the Comelec’s legal chief Ferdinand Rafanan expressed “euphoria,” the PCOS shit had suddenly hit the fan. Four presidential candidates backtracked from their earlier statements of concession and charged that the AES count showed very serious anomalies. Four days later, even more complaints and protests surfaced. By now, everybody knows about the discrepancies brought to light by mayoralty candidate Lito Atienza between the PCOS and manual counts in many of Manila’s voting clusters. As I write this, over a dozen Quezon City candidates, including three mayoralty, three congressional, and over half a dozen aspirants for councilor banded together and held a press conference to denounce widespread anomalies in the PCOS election tally, as well as, the random manual audit that is being held in secrecy (without the presence of observers from various opposition parties or candidates). Mayoralty bet Annie Susano, for one, presented a handwritten letter, purportedly an offer from a Comelec operator, to “fix” the results in QC in her favor for P150 million. Another candidate for QC mayor also observed that in many precinct counts for him and his running mate, Aiko Melendez, there is a uniform 17 percent share of the votes, which bears another statistical improbability. Meanwhile, congressional candidate Vivienne Tan (representing QC’s 1st district) also narrated the statistically anomalous situation in several precinct cluster counts where there were exactly the same vote totals. I called up the campaign manager of Laguna gubernatorial bet Joey Lina, Nanding Martin, who had called me a week later to report that the PCOS tests in their province failed completely and where test ballots cast for Lina were not counted by the machines. The machines the Comelec finally used were supposed to be good but when the election results came in, they were stunned by the statistical improbabilities, so much so that they couldn’t figure out how to even begin examining the results. From the European Digital Rights Web site, we have this report on the controversy of automated voting systems: “The use of e-voting was challenged by political scientist Joachim Wiesner and his son, physicist Ulrich Wiesner who complained that the system was not transparent because the voter could not check what actually happened to his vote, being actually asked to blindly trust the technology. The voting machines which are manufactured by the Dutch firm Nedap, do not print out receipts. In the plaintiffs’ opinion, the results could be manipulated. A petition signed by over 45,000 people in 2005, trying to ban e-voting, had been rejected by the German government. Now, the court ruled that the Federal Voting Machines Ordinance having introduced e-voting was unconstitutional because it did not ‘ensure that only such voting machines are permitted and used which meet the constitutional requirements of the principle of the public nature of elections’… “Also the court considered that, differently from the traditional voting system where manipulations and frauds are much more difficult involving a high degree of effort and a high risk of detection, ‘programming errors in the software or deliberate electoral fraud committed by manipulating the software of electronic voting machines can be recognized only with difficulty.’ Also, in the court’s opinion, the electors should be able to verify how their vote is recorded without having to possess detailed computer knowledge. “If the election result is determined through computer-controlled processing of the votes stored in an electronic memory, it is not sufficient if merely the result of the calculation process carried out in the voting machine can be taken note of by means of a summarizing printout or an electronic display.” A campaign against electronic voting has been initiated by EDRi member Chaos Computer Club together with the Dutch foundation Wij vertrouwen stemcomputers niet (We don’t trust voting computers) because of the risk of electronic errors and the potential for abuse. After a group of hackers had succeeded in tampering with similar machines in the Netherlands in 2006, the Dutch government imposed a moratorium on the use of electronic voting machines and Ireland also has banned electronic voting. If Lina’s campaign manager, a UST philosophy graduate who has held various managerial positions in transnational corporations, including Levi’s Philippines, has had difficulty comprehending the many technical facets of automatic voting, how then could countless others with much less expertise even hope to understand when a PCOS machine has been pre-programmed to cheat, as explained in computer expert Ike Señeres’ blog, www.senseneres.blogspot.com. Susano thus says of the PCOS: “This is setting a precedent for all future elections; we will scrutinize this minutely. It’s turning out to be a dangerous proposition.” So says this text: “If the PCOS (peddlers) get away with (their) tricks this time, they will probably use it in referendums next.” Truly, we can’t afford to let the PCOS smartasses pull this fast one on us. (Tune in to 1098AM, Sulo ng Pilipino, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, 6 p.m. to 7 p.m.; Global News Network, Destiny Cable Channel 21, Talk News TV, Tuesday, 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. on “The Automated Election System Mess” with IT expert Vivienne Tan and candidate Annie Susano; also visit http://hermantiulaurel.blogspot.com) (Reprinted with permission from Mr. Herman Tiu-Laurel)  Source:  The Daily Tribune URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20100517com4.html

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