Familiarity breeds contempt

IN last month’s Joint Congressional Oversight Committee (JCOC) on Automated Election System (AES) presided by Sen. Koko Pimentel as the chairman, Commissioner Christian Lim of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) stated, “For source code audit and review, this will bring you of the algorithms and policies as reviewed to validate the correct implementation and most importantly to ensure that the code contains no hidden functionalities such as Trojan horses, conditional compilation flags, test flags or hardcore passwords. The source code review tools utilized by SLI, includes LocMetric line counter, module finder, parasoft C/C++, ExamDiff Pro and Fortify.” None of these tools are provided for use by the reviewers in the ongoing conduct of local source code review (SCR).

The SLI or Systest Labs Inc., or currently known as the SLI Global Solutions, is a foreign company based in Denver, Colorado. It was the same company that did the SCR for the 2010 and 2013 national and local elections (NLEs). And for the 2016 NLEs, Comelec awarded the limited source bidding to SLI at the latter’s winning bid of US$766,375 or around P35 Million. That’s the third time; and likewise the third time of the hocus-PCOS of Smartmatic in our National and Local Elections! It’s a very consistent trend in spite of the fact that SLI was noncompliant and suspended under the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) accreditation program.