Error in application

During the Joint Congressional Canvassing Committee hearing on May 26, 2010 at the Batasang Pambansa (BP) hall, Sen. Enrile asked a question why the computer servers in BP and PICC had 256 million and 150,000 million registered voters, respectively, though in fact that the registered voters at that time was only 51.3 million. Under oath, Cesar Flores of Smartmatic replied, “Error in application!” Ouch! As a resource person, I was shocked…and therefore recommended to the Committee that the canvassing system should not be used as it could have not passed through proper testing and certification. In short, it was defective then. The following day, the canvassing started not knowing if there had been a fix made. Hmmm!

Another shocking revelation on May 26 was the vivid negligence of the Technical Evaluation Committee (TEC) in addressing the compensating controls that the SysTest Labs, Inc. (SLI) recommended in implementing the AES. The law--RA 9369, Section 11--clearly mandates that the TEC shall certify, through an established international certification entity not later than three months before the date of the electoral exercises, categorically stating that the automated election system (AES) is operating properly, securely, and accurately. Based on Comelec Advisory Council’s (CAC) recommendation to Comelec, SLI was contracted to support TEC in the latter’s role to certify. SLI did its job but TEC failed to address said controls; that is, there were no test certifications to show that all the 82,000 PCOS machines had 99.9995% accuracy rating (required by law), that the integration testing was successful from the PCOS machines up to the national consolidation and canvassing system (i.e., including the testing of all telecommunications facilities and digital signing), that the source code is kept in escrow at Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, that the source code reviewed is one and the same as that used by the equipment, etc. That TEC failure happened not only in 2010, but was also repeated in the 2013 elections.