16 early transmission attempts made in midterm elections — IT expert

MANILA, Philippines — A former technology manager of Smartmatic confirmed on Tuesday that there were at least 16 early “transmission attempts” prior to the official start of transmission during the May 2016 elections.

According to IT expert Jeff Dy, the technical working group (TWG) have observed the attempts happening even before the polling precincts closed at 6 p.m.

“We are unanimous in stating that there really is, as confirmed by the logs submitted to us, at least 16 early transmission attempts from VCM logs submitted by Comelec,” Sy said during the joint congressional oversight committee hearing on the automated elections system held in the Senate.

“However, the TWG cannot conclude if these actually altered election results,” Sy added.

Dy’s revelation came a year after Senate President Vicente Sotto III revealed in his privilege speech that results for the 2016 elections were altered given that early vote transmission from the vote counting machines (VCM).

Aside from this, Sotto also bared the existence of “queue servers,” the existence of foreign access to poll servers, and the failed transmission of 1.7 million election returns during the said elections.

READ: Sotto informant claims 2016 poll results ‘altered’

According to Dy, Sotto’s claim about the “queue servers” was also confirmed but effects to the election results cannot be verified.

“There is an existence of store and forward server as found out in the logs submitted to us. For lack of a name, we will call it a queue messaging server with IP address 10.101.1.198 which is found to be transmitting to 92 percent of the VCM logs submitted,” he said.

As regards to the existence of foreign access to servers and the failed transmission of some election returns, Sy said that information given to them were not enough to make a conclusion.  (Editor: Mike U. Frialde)