Thursday, May 19, 2011 | MANILA, PHILIPPINES
Strategic Perspective -- by René B. Azurin
Forcing through
In basketball, the offense used to be descriptively called "forcing through." This was a foul on the charging player. No referee, however, is expected to call a foul on the six Comelec commissioners who’ve rammed through a lone blocker (Commissioner Gus Lagman) to satisfy an ardent desire to buy Smartmatic’s PCOS machines for the ARMM elections in August. They doubtless intend to get away with sweeping aside prescribed procedures and the warnings of IT experts on the serious flaws of the Smartmatic system.The referee here should be the Joint Congressional Oversight Committee. According to the Poll Automation Law (R.A. 9369), it is the JCOC that should finally decide whether "[a] particular AES [automated election system] technology is already appropriate and should be utilized fully for subsequent election [sic]." R.A. 9369 also provides that it is the JCOC that should determine whether "[a] particular AES technology should no longer be utilized for being obsolete, inapplicable, inaccurate or with a defect which cannot be remedied." The 6-to-1 vote in the en banc session of the Commission on Elections probably means that the six charging commissioners -- lawyers all -- believe that they can just ignore the JCOC in this matter and dispense with such minor legal details.
The six commissioners also presumably feel more knowledgeable about information technology issues than the top IT experts in the country (including the dissenting Mr. Lagman). Ateneo computer science professor Dr. Pablo Manalastas, for example, said that he "found the Smartmatic-supplied PCOS technology... full of bugs and errors... (and) not fit for use in any election." Clearly perplexed, he continued, "Yet it defies human logic and common sense that despite public concerns about the AES -- including from the country’s key IT organizations and academics -- the Comelec is hell-bent on re-using the discredited Smartmatic PCOS in the coming elections."
The Comelec’s behavior actually has IT industry practitioners and computer science experts in an uproar. In a letter last month to the Senate Committee on Local Governments, Dr. Manalastas, De La Salle Dean of Computer Science Dr. Rachel Roxas, Philippine Computer Society Foundation President Nelson Celis, Philippine Computer Emergency Response Team President Angel Averia, Philippine Computer Society’s Edmundo Casiño, and others, unequivocally said that "we are against the use of the defective PCOS machines/AES used in the May 2010 elections."
AES Watch is a nonpartisan, independent coalition of citizens’ groups that closely monitored the conduct of the May 2010 elections. This election watchdog includes some 40 organizations like Namfrel, CBCP-Nassa, the National Council of Churches of the Philippines, Transparency International-Philippines, the Center for People Empowerment in Governance, the UP Alumni Association, the Philippine Computer Society Foundation, the Computing Society of the Philippines, the Computer Professionals Union, the Philippine Computer Emergency Response Team, CAUCUS-Philippine Computer Society, and the deans and faculty of the computer science departments of UP, De La Salle, and Ateneo. In a released formal statement, AES Watch said that "the Smartmatic-provided PCOS technology is non-transparent, dismally lacks security safeguards, is non-auditable, and is full of inaccuracies." Of the conduct of the May 2010 elections, AES Watch categorically stated that "the election technology was critically defective not only in terms of software and infrastructures but also in election management and legal implementation."
Notably, the Comelec’s own technical advisory council, chaired (then) by Mr. Anthony Roxas-Chua, recommended (in a post-election report dated June 20, 2010) that Comelec not lease or buy the Smartmatic PCOS machines for future elections.
In ignoring all these independent experts and observers, one surely has to be impressed by the confidence exhibited by the six Comelec commissioners in their own IT knowledge and abilities.
For the ARMM elections, reliable sources report that Comelec is preparing to negotiate a contract amounting to some P 1.95 billion. That amount is broken down as follows: hardware (PCOS machines), P130.9 million; ballot boxes, P17.0 million; election consumables, P50.3 million; technology related services, P756.0 million, and non-technology related services, P1,000.0 million. In a letter to the Senate’s Joint Congressional Oversight Committee for Elections, IT industry guru Manuel Alcuaz Jr. declared, "The proposed contract is definitely bloated."
Mr. Alcuaz noted that "ARMM’s 3,379 PCOS precincts represent only 4.42% of the national total of 76,347 PCOS precincts." He pointed out that 4.42% of the amount of P1,900 million spent for technology services in the May 2010 elections is only P83.9 million, not P756.0 million. Ah, that’s an overprice of 800%! Mr. Alcuaz also observed that, in the 2010 elections, Comelec rented the 82,200 PCOS machines for P30,600 per machine and, now, proposes to buy 4,000 machines for the same amount per machine. He then pointed to Comelec’s oft-repeated justification for buying the Smartmatic machines as the Smartmatic contract’s stipulation that Comelec had the right to buy the machines at only 30% of their rental price. That being so, the correct price for the machines is P9,185 each, which translates to a total of P36 million for 4,000 machines, not P130.9 million. The overprice here is around 300%! Mr. Alcuaz also wondered what a whopping P1000.0 million of non-technology-related services could include and why this should be negotiated with a technology contractor like Smartmatic.
The incentives for forcing through this new deal with Smartmatic are becoming clear.
For a European Union-funded project, the UP-based research group Center for People Empowerment in Governance studied the automation of the 2010 elections from its beginnings (in 2008). CenPEG executive director Evita Jimenez and policy studies director Bobby Tuazon said in a recent press conference, "As in the first automated elections of May 10, 2010, the Comelec, now headed by former election lawyer Sixto Brillantes, is again short-cutting the procedure and is making decisions under a shroud of secrecy."
Neither Comelec nor the Venezuelan company Smartmatic and its Philippine partner TIM have been able to rebut the criticisms of groups like AES Watch and CenPEG.
In a joint statement, AES Watch and CenPEG stated, "There should be no illusion that modern technology will guarantee a free election. Who controls the machine controls the votes. There are more daunting tasks that should be addressed to make our elections democratic and these include a thorough reform of the Comelec to make it a credible and independent election manager. The cheating machineries of traditional political parties and oligarchs should be effectively checked. Until these issues are effectively answered, the people’s right to equalize the election playing field and their freedom to choose a government that truly represents their sovereign voice will remain on paper only."
Very well said.
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