{"id":5444,"date":"2016-05-02T19:16:06","date_gmt":"2016-05-02T11:16:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ibon.org\/?p=5444"},"modified":"2016-05-03T09:34:35","modified_gmt":"2016-05-03T01:34:35","slug":"automated-polls-privatized-elections-foreign-controlled-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/automated-polls-privatized-elections-foreign-controlled-democracy\/","title":{"rendered":"Automated Polls: Privatized elections, foreign-controlled democracy (Part 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Second of Two Parts<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

By Arnold Padilla<\/em><\/p>\n

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Why Smartmatic prevails<\/strong><\/p>\n

Why Smartmatic keeps on winning Comelec contracts boggles the mind especially considering the numerous and major malfunctions by the machines and services that Smartmatic provided in the past two elections. To illustrate, while the AES law mandates a 99.995% accuracy rate, Smartmatic\u2019s PCOS machines registered a 99.6% rate in 2010 and 99.98% in 2013. These translate to hundreds of thousands of miscounted ballots and undermine the credibility of the election results. Further, Smartmatic\u2019s ERTS is supposed to reach 100% transmission rate within 24 hours<\/span><\/span>. But in 2013, it was able to achieve a mere 76% transmission rate when Comelec started declaring winners.
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There have been allegations of rigged bidding to favor Smartmatic such as designing contracts where only Smartmatic can qualify or omitting requirements that will otherwise disqualify Smartmatic, a company tainted with various controversies even before it started its lucrative business here in the Philippines. For the upcoming elections\u2019 bidding for PCOS\/VCM, for instance, Comelec required that only those that can supply both the election management system and the machines could bid (which only fits Smartmatic) and that ongoing legal cases (which Smartmatic has arising from past electoral protests) should not prohibit bidders to participate. There were also similar complaints during the 2013 elections such as in the supply of CF cards. A competitor lost because its CF cards don\u2019t work with Smartmatic\u2019s PCOS machines as the latter refused to declare the machines\u2019 technical requirements, which Smartmatic claimed is proprietary information.
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But why does the Comelec so heavily favor Smartmatic, allowing it to monopolize the entire automated election system? One possible explanation is the political connections of Smartmatic with groups that have an interest in securing electoral victory. Smartmatic\u2019s chairman, British Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, was the late President Cory Aquino\u2019s campaign strategist during the 1986 snap elections (some accounts claim that Malloch-Brown\u2019s group then \u2013 the Sawyer-Miller consultancy firm \u2013 was assigned by the US Central Intelligence Agency or CIA to Cory\u2019s camp). In an interview with the Philippine Daily Inquirer during his visit here in June last year, Malloch-Brown claimed that his \u201cfinal outstanding accomplishment during the Cory campaign was to produce an exit poll that indicated that she had won\u201d. Malloch-Brown has supposedly developed a close relationship with the Aquino family and there were reports that he met with Cory\u2019s son President Benigno Aquino III and other politicians during his visit in the Philippines last year. Malloch-Brown, however denied this, apparently mindful of repercussions in public perception.
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Nonetheless, the presence of Malloch-Brown, a foreigner who made a career out of influencing elections in supposedly sovereign countries and strategizing for client political elites, in a private company that runs our elections is a big red flag. It further underscores the dangers of privatizing elections that have been perpetually marred by massive fraud even before automation.
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The failure of the current AES technology to reach minimum standards set by the law means that election results could not be relied upon. At best, they could just be the result of glitches caused by machine\/software and human errors. At worst, they point to the planned manipulation of poll results by those who have access to the election technology or have ties with the private and foreign interests that control the technology. Both in 2010 and 2013, allegations of electronic fraud were widespread ranging from supposedly altered results being transmitted by the PCOS machines to pre-programming of results such as the so-called \u201c60-30-10\u201d pattern (60% of votes for administration bets; 30% for opposition; and 10% for other candidates) during the midterm senatorial election.
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It doesn\u2019t help that another seemingly favored private, foreign company is also controlling the conduct of the source code review, a supposed safeguard under the AES law that scrutinizes the software to be used by the voting machines and by the canvassing and consolidation system. For the May 2016 elections, US-based SLI Global Solutions Inc. (formerly Systest Labs Inc.) is carrying out the source code review for Php35 million as it did in 2010 and 2013.
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Undermining democracy and sovereignty\u00a0<\/b>
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To be sure, the flaws of the country\u2019s electoral system go beyond the issue of conducting it manually or electronically. Whether manual or electronic, elections will remain undemocratic as long as the people are left to choose among the same contending factions of the political and economic elite. And these groups and families vying for control of state power in order to advance the economic and political interests they represent will continue to find ways to subvert the elections through direct cheating, political patronage and\/or violence and terrorism.
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But these fundamental problems of the electoral system are further worsened by allowing private and foreign companies through the technology they own to control the entire electoral process \u2013 from reading and recording of ballots to the canvassing of results. Even for the technical support, troubleshooting, installation of system, training of staff, etc., the Comelec is completely dependent on a private, foreign company.
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While modernizing the way the country conducts its elections with the use of appropriate technology founded on the principles of transparency and credibility is the right step to take, the AES that the Comelec has been implementing since 2010 is further undermining election as a democratic exercise and an expression of the people\u2019s sovereignty. ###<\/span><\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Second of Two Parts By Arnold Padilla   Why Smartmatic prevails Why Smartmatic keeps on winning Comelec contracts boggles the mind especially considering the numerous and major malfunctions by the machines and services that Smartmatic provided in the past two elections. To illustrate, while the AES law mandates a 99.995% accuracy rate, Smartmatic\u2019s PCOS machines […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":5446,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,12],"tags":[188,76,266,295,297,296,298,294,116,264,265],"class_list":["post-5444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-national-socioeconomic-situation","tag-beyondelections2016","tag-aquino-administration","tag-automated-polls","tag-cia","tag-cory-aquino","tag-malloch-brown","tag-noynoy-aquino","tag-pcos","tag-philippine-economy","tag-privatized-elections","tag-smartmatic","wpautop"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-07-23 22:00:11","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5444"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5444\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5453,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5444\/revisions\/5453"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}