What chutzpah! EDITORIAL 06/12/2010

What chutzpah!

EDITORIAL Click to enlarge 06/12/2010 Election cheats at the Commission on Elections (Comelec) must be jumping for joy, a day after a commissioner, Gregorio Larrazabal, announced to reporters that the 2013 elections will still be automated and will be using the Smartmatic precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines, which naturally translates to again giving the 2013 automated elections contract to its tech partner, Smartmatic. This is obvious, since the Comelec officials clearly don’t know a thing about conducting automated elections, having left everything to Smartmatic, and both clearly botching up the 2010 polls. Besides, Comelec was earlier given the option to buy the PCOS machines — defective as they are, and more defective in their inability to read the ovals in the ballots, as well as the compact flash (CF) cards being reusable, in the sense of their being programmed again to drop and make the votes vanish for one candidate,while adding up the votes of the rival candidate, which is the new electronic dagdag-bawas method in which the cheats in the Comelec, Smartmatic and DoST and other IT-savvy cheats engage. There certainly is more than meets the eye in this move of the Comelec to insist on the Smartmatic machines and the company’s system for the 2013 polls, since it was pretty evident that all anti-fraud safeguards were eliminated. And those security features, as well as the source code which is still being kept hidden from the IT experts as well as the public, won’t be restored either, and neither will the poll body’s ways change either, since there will still be no real certification, and worse, if there is no judgment from the Supreme Court on the digital signatures, as expressed in the e-commerce law, the poll body and Smartmatic will once again resort to this and screw the Filipino electorate, defrauding them of their sovereign will.... MORE     Source:  The Daily Tribune URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20100612com1.html

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