THE Supreme Court announced a week ago its decision to void theP300-million contract between Smartmatic and the Comelec to diagnose and repair about 80,000 voting machines that will be used in the 2016 elections. This decision granted the petition of the AES Watch and the Integrated Bar of the Philippines questioning the midnight deal and asking the court to stop the contract.

The Precinct Count Optical Scanner (PCOS) machine and the whole automated election system used in the 2010 and 2013 elections have failed to satisfy basic expectations of a voter with regard to the transparency, reliability and verifiability of elections. I wrote in 2010 and 2013 a series of articles pointing out problems and vulnerabilities of the Comelec-Smartmatic PCOS and the automated election system. All of them were points of failure sometime during actual elections and will still hound us in 2016 should we use the same machines.

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