Failure of automation FRONTLINE Ninez Cacho-Olivares 06/08/2010

Failure of automation

FRONTLINE Ninez Cacho-Olivares 06/08/2010 It will hardly be admitted by the Commission on Elections (Comelec), its partner, Smartmatic-TIM, and of course the winning candidates that the automated presidential election was an utter failure. Sure, the automation gave out the election results just hours after the polls closed, but were the results correct and accurate and were they credible? More importantly, were the votes rigged, to favor certain candidates?  There is certainly a lot of doubt, given the many mysterious ways the poll body and Smartmatic went into, to ensure that a lot of human intervention came into play — which human intervention was supposed to have been eliminated by the Automated Election System (AES). Truth is, the Comelec insisted on going into the AES, knowing that it was ill-prepared for automation, refusing to strictly adhere to the automation law which called for some sort of a pilot automated election, with just a few cities, provinces and municipalities in the three regions of the country participating, having been blinded by the huge P11.3 billion budget of the Comelec for the 2010 polls. Truth too, is that the Comelec bungled the AES, big time, along with its partner, Smartmatic, that was probably only to eager to do away with a lot of provisions of the automation law and the contract demands. After all, even as Smartmatic and Comelec failed the SysTest Lab’s 99.995 accuracy test, mainly because the conditions demanded by SysTest for such accuracy and integrity of the program and system were never met, they still claimed that such a certification was issued, which was a complete lie, since conditions imposed by SysTest were never complied with. There were just too many anti-fraud safeguards to ensure the credibility and accuracy of the results of the automated elections.... MORE     Source:  The Daily Tribune URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20100608com2.html

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