Sotto exposé has echoes of YouTube video on 2016 poll fraud

PHOTO/ Raffy Lerma

Senate Minority Leader Vicente “Tito” Sotto III on Tuesday bared that an “impeccable source” disclosed to him that there was already a “transmission” of votes a day before polling precincts opened for the 2016 National Elections.

Sotto, in a privilege speech, said that while Smartmatic can say that the transmissions were only “testing transmissions,” it cannot be such “because as far as I can remember, the last official testing was made on April 23, 2016.”

“Now who is this transmitting the data from 9:17 a.m. of May 8 and after three minutes, transmit again three times?” Sotto said in his speech.

“The transmission is being done by IP Address 10.11.5.5 to 0507.ccs.pili2016pinas.net as seen in logs of SRVCNTADNS01 server,” he said, pointing to a slide show.

YouTube video

The information disclosed to him by the source whom he did not name, Sotto said, showed a possible case of electoral sabotage, prompting him to seek a Senate investigation on the matter.

The senator’s expose appeared to coincide with a video titled “Hacking Democracy PH – The world should know how they cheated” that circulated on YouTube some time in September 2017.

According to the video, which was published by a YouTube user named “Thinking Minds,” election servers were working overtime collating data transmitted by “rogue vote counting machines” on May 8, a day before polling precincts were opened.

“Polling precincts were not due to be opened for the next 23 hours. Oddly, these transmissions came only from a set of 9 IP addresses. One IP address had more access than the rest,” the female narrator of the video said.

“From the pattern of the access, it seems the queries or attempts only came from either a small set of computers or they were using Comelec assigned USB data sticks to transmit from a handful of VCMs in their possession,” it said.

Marcos thanks Sotto for exposing ‘anomalies’

Former senator Bongbong Marcos, who contested incumbent Vice President Leni Robredo’s electoral victory in the Supreme Court (SC), said he was happy as “he is no longer a voice in the wilderness.”

“Other patriotic leaders and stakeholders have seen the extent of the conspiracy, interference and manipulation of the election results by Smartmatic and have begun to speak out,” Marcos said in a statement on Wednesday, a day after Sotto’s expose.

“We congratulate Senator Tito Sotto for bringing the election anomalies to the attention of the public,” the former vice presidential candidate said.
Marcos said that “informed observers” wondered why the Commission on Elections (Comelec) still awarded the contract to purchase vote counting machines to Smartmatic “despite all the evidence of massive cheating.”

“We have never understood Comelec’s insistence in again awarding Smartmatic despite the multitude transgressions attributed to it,” Marcos said.

“All the issues raised by Senator Sotto need to be investigated and all the questions he asked need to be answered by both Smartmatic and the COMELEC,” he stressed.