Comelec: Namfrel approved use of transmission router

MANILA, Philippines – The National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel) was among the stakeholders who agreed to use the transmission router for vote-counting machines (VCMs) in the May 13 midterm elections, Commission on Elections (Comelec) said Friday.

Comelec Spokesman James Jimenez issued the statement after Namfrel supposedly claimed that it was “not aware of the transmission router solution” that was recently linked to the controversial “meet-me-room” server.

READ: Comelec: ‘Meet me room’ not a separate server, only a transmission gateway
Jimenez noted that Namfrel was among those that agreed to the use of the transmission router, citing minutes of a consultation last January 17.

“It seems that people are forgetting things. Again, Namfrel was present at that meeting and at that meeting the most important thing to discuss was the transmission,” Jimenez said in a press briefing.

In the same meeting, Jimenez said that the Comelec laid down conditions on the use of the transmission router, was “unanimously” agreed upon.

The conditions include: data must be forwarded as soon as possible and not retained in the transmission router for more than an hour;  data must be deleted upon successful transmission; the use of the transmission router must be subject to local source code review and international certification and data cannot be remotely accessible.

“It was always the idea for the transmission router to just be a traffic cop. It was never a facility to store data not like what people are trying to say now,” Jimenez pointed out.  (Editor: Gilbert S. Gaviola)