Gordon seeks to postpone elections

Senatorial candidate Richard Gordon on Wednesday night sought the postponement of the May 13 elections, saying that the automated elections will likely be not clean and honest because it will be powered by a “dishonest” source code.

“If the source code is dishonest, the whole election is dishonest,” Gordon told the Supreme Court, one of many arguments he made at Wednesday’s oral arguments on his petition for a review of the source code.

The source code is the readable computer program that runs the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines.

Gordon stood as the lead counsel to his petition asking the high court to compel the Commission on Elections to produce the source code and to allow its review by political parties and candidates.

He repeatedly questioned the credibility of the source code to be delivered Thursday by the Dominion Voting System Inc.

Gordon, who is on the slate of the United Nationalist Alliance, said that according to experts it would take six months to review  the source code.

This prompted Chief Justice Ma. Lourdes Sereno to ask Gordon if he was seeking the postponement of the elections.

Gordon said the Supreme Court was “not precluded to doing that.”

But Associate Justice Marvic Leonen said that only Congress could postpone the May 13 elections.

“This may not be done unless it’s authorized by law,” Leonen said of Gordon’s suggestion for the postponement of Monday’s polls.

Gordon later told reporters that when he suggested the postponement of the elections it was just an answer to the questions of justices about options. “I did not propose it. They just asked me,” he said.

Associate Justice Presbitero Velasco, meanwhile, said it was impossible for the high court to grant the review of the source code as requested by Gordon because the elections were to be held on Monday.

It was Velasco who also pointed out to Gordon that his petition for the high court to compel the poll body to produce the source code was moot because of the expected announcement of Comelec Chairman Sixto Brillantes that he had already obtained it.

But Gordon insisted that his second petition was for the high court to allow the review of the source code.

Brillantes said Wednesday night that the poll body would start the review of the source code on Thursday and invited political parties to attend.

Brillantes said the source code from Dominion arrived on Tuesday night while the other source code from SLI came on Sunday.

He said he would present the source code to the media on Thursday and invited the justices to come to the presentation.

The Comelec chairman said both Dominion and SLI were talking to compare their respective source codes to see if they were the same.

To Gordon’s statement to reporters that Comelec had not yet gotten hold of the source code, Brillantes said the source code was still with Dominion and SLI and that this would be turned over to the poll body on Thursday for review.

After that, he said the Comelec would deposit the source code with the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas for safekeeping.