MANILA, Philippines—Why did a senior official of Smartmatic Corp. go to the operations center of the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) in Manila two hours before voting ended on Monday?
The poll watchdog AES Watch on Tuesday raised this question as it criticized the glitch that took place in the early release of the tally of Senate results during the PPCRV’s count.
AES Watch expert Ernie del Rosario expressed “grave concerns” about the alleged presence of Albert Castro Rico, Smartmatic’s global services director for Asia-Pacific, at the PPCRV operations center in Pope Pius Center at around 5 p.m.
“The Smartmatic official has and should have no business being there,” Del Rosario said.
Castro Rico, a Spaniard, was the project manager of Smartmatic during the aborted 2008 Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao poll automation project and one of the signatories in the 2009 poll automation contract between the company and the Commission on Elections (Comelec).
The glitch was discovered after some 12 million votes entered the electronic tabulation within the first hour of the quick count. PPCRV suspended its canvassing for fours to fix the multimillion figures that appeared on its server.
Another AES Watch coconvener, former Philippine Computer Society president Nelson Celis, said:
“Smartmatic has no business dealing with a citizens’ arm that should exercise independence especially from a foreigner. Mr. Castro [Rico] should explain what he was doing there. There is no other reason I know why Smartmatic’s top operations man was at the PPCRV server. Is PPCRV using Smartmatic’s consolidated canvassing system?”
Independent canvassing
The PPCRV was supposed to have its own independent canvassing system, added Del Rosario, former head of the Comelec technical working group on poll automation who resigned in 2008 over differences with officials on quality standards.
The PPCRV communications director, Ana de Villa Singson, has apologized for the glitch, but AES Watch said a detailed explanation must be made.
“The initial results at the PPCRV were too fast to be true, that’s why the Comelec, PPCRV at Smartmatic are pointing at one another who is at fault,” Del Rosario said.
He recalled that during the 2010 elections, the Comelec national canvassing center also came out with a total of 256 million votes cast for the President.
Another AES Watch member, political expert Rene Azurin, called the disruption at the PPCRV center a “major security breach.”
“The PPCRV disruption was not a ‘formatting error’; an arithmetic operation was performed, hence, it was a program error. And this program was never available for independent review. So, what is the Smartmatic person doing altering scripts when canvassing is already in progress?” he asked.
Outsourcing democracy
Azurin also criticized the Comelec’s postponement of the canvassing from Monday night to Tuesday morning.
“I thought the Comelec was 99.9999-percent prepared for the 2013 polls? [Comelec Chairman Sixto] Brillantes said the official canvass was postponed to Tuesday morning because Comelec officials were tired. That is the thinnest excuse I ever heard,” he said.
“The whole rationale for the automation is instant results … and they will postpone the official canvass? Results are being transmitted as polls close and they will be coming in throughout the night, so why the need for delay? Is this to allow prior review of the results so these can be altered before the ‘official’ canvass?” Azurin asked.
Azurin echoed the call of other officials of AES Watch, a broad coalition of independent IT professionals, watchdogs, academic and nongovernment policy research and grassroots organizations advocating transparent and secured poll automation.
“We should stop outsourcing our democracy to foreign business interests colluding with their local vested interest partners and begin developing our own indigenous voting technology appropriate to the Filipino culture and Philippine conditions,” he said.—With a report from Kaiza Marie Nawal, Inquirer Mindanao