Senate Majority Floor Leader Vicente “Tito” Sotto III presented more proofs on Wednesday to back up his claims that the 2016 elections were tainted with irregularities.
In a privilege speech, Sotto disclosed the last-minute installation of “four queuing servers,” an issue that he said “really tainted the outcome of the elections.”
The senator explained that during the last elections, there were only two servers that were functioning — CNTADNS that was used by all vote-counting machines (VCMs) and Consolidated Canvassing System (CCS); and CNTBDNS used only by four IP addresses from May 10 to May 11 only.
“The technical process of transmission is that the VCMs will ask for the IP address of the recipient from the Domain Name Server (DNS) so it can transmit the data. Here, all VCM’s queries were communicated only to one server, and that is CNTADNS Server,” Sotto explained.
“The recipients are the Municipal/City Board of Canvassers, Provincial/Regional Board of Canvassers, Transparency Servers and the Central Servers. This was the actual procedure done during the peak period of transmissions on May 9-10,” he pointed out.
But suddenly on May 10 to 11, Sotto said, the rules changed in the middle of the game.
“For some unknown reason, the transmissions from the VCM’s did not go straight to the Consolidating Canvassing System (CCS) but instead, went through either one of the four “Queuing Servers” before reaching the CCS,” he said.
“By then, two servers are now involved in the process. This additional Server CNTBDNSO1 is now communicating with the queries of the VCMs after it has gone to queuing.”
A queuing server, he said, is a device to organize and line up all the incoming data to make sure that what goes in will be sent out so no data is left behind.
“The question now is, how relevant and crucial is this queuing server? Is it that vital, that the engineers were willing to risk a possible data loss or crashing of an ongoing system, by installing a new device in the middle of the transmission process? As we can see, despite having these queuing servers, the results were still not equal among all servers,” the Majority Leader said.
While Smartmatic might say that the queuing servers were meant to ensure the accuracy of the transmissions, Sotto questioned why they were installed only on May 10 to 11.
“The transmissions made after the elections on May 9-10 went well, I suppose, without this queuing servers. Also, the bulk of the transmissions happened on May 9-10. If indeed these queuing servers are of any help then these should have been there from the beginning,” he pointed out.
Aside from the queuing servers, Sotto also questioned the establishment of 7 regional hubs of the Commission on Elections just one week before the May 9, 2016 polls.
The senator also disclosed that 3.86% of the election returns representing at least 1.7 million votes were not transmitted electronically “for some reason or another.”
While the Comelec had already assured the public that these “un-transmitted” votes were included in the final count by manually tallying of the contents of the SD cards,” Sotto cited a report by the National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel), seeking further clarification as to the guideline observed by the poll body on the chain of custody of the said SD cards.
“Also, were the political parties, accredited citizen’s arm allowed or were asked to observe the manual tallying of these 3.86% un-transmitted votes? These 1.7 Million votes are very crucial to ongoing electoral protests,” Sotto said.
Sotto first exposed in a privilege speech last week the alleged irregularities in the last elections.
READ: Sotto bares irregularities in 2016 polls