By BUENA BERNAL and PAULINE DYCOCO
WITH 23 days to go before elections, a group of information technology (IT) professionals has urged the electoral body to adopt a simple, doable and transparent system to ensure the credibility of the polls.
They call it the simplified parallel count, a procedure they said could “plug the holes” of the automated system and prevent wholesale fraud and manipulation come May 10.
“Ours is a most reasonable request. It is the most logical solution to the uncertainties in the coming election. There is absolutely no reason why the Commission on Elections will not accept our recommendation,” TransparentElections.org. convenor Augusto “Gus” Lagman said during the press conference of the Movement for Good Governance (MGG) in Makati this week.
Lagman on parallel manual count
In a closed-door meeting with IT professionals yesterday, Comelec Commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal said the poll body will decide on the matter on Wednesday. He asked for a detailed proposal that he could present for the en banc session.
According to National IT Standards Foundation (PhilNITS) President Corazon Akol, who was present at the meeting, a technical group composed of representatives from the Comelec and the IT industry was formed to iron out the details of the proposal.
The idea of a parallel count is this: Run a manual count for the positions of president, vice president and mayor, and compare the results with that of the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machine. If the difference is more than eight votes or 1.3 percent, do a manual count for all positions.
This extra step will take only three hours for a precinct with 600 voters and five hours for a precinct with 1,000 voters. The Board of Election Inspectors (BEI) will execute the count and the public will witness the counting.
The entire exercise will cost P300 million as payment to the BEIs who will be conducting the manual count. Comelec’s budget for the automation is P11.3 billion. The Smartmatic bid is only P7.2 billion.
“It doesn’t cost that much. Three hundred million pesos is a small price to pay for accuracy,” Joe Magsaysay of the Management Association of the Philippines told another press briefing held in Makati last Wednesday.
Should Comelec approve the proposal, Lagman said it will have to issue general instructions on the parallel count and print 76,000 Election Return forms.
The proposal will validate the competency of the automated system, the groups said. According to Comelec, the Smartmatic PCOS machines passed the tests with an accuracy rating of 99.995 percent.
“The truth is that the PCOS machines, the operating and transmission programs and the whole system itself can be rigged, without our even knowing how or where the new and sophisticated ‘dagdag bawas’ scheme might be perpetrated,” Akol said.
The parallel manual count is the IT groups’ last-ditch effort to push for more accountability and transparency for this year’s elections.
Election watchdog groups said many safeguards set in place by law and fleshed out by IT experts were disregarded, removed and replaced. Comelec, for instance, did not allow for a “source code” review and an on-the-spot verification by the voter.
They said , “Unless Comelec agrees to this proposal, our fear of the worst nightmare, an automated Garci, could become a reality.”
The authors are students of the University of Sto. Tomas and Bicol University doing their summer internship at Vera Files.