Keep Smartmatic out of 2016 polls

Smartmatic, supplier of the twice-manipulated Precinct Count Optical Scan vote counting and canvassing system, claims it owns the PCOS technology and is the only one legally allowed to maintain it. If that’s true, the Commission on Elections must move now to use a different method of voting and tabulation, even a return to manual count.

If the Comelec won’t, it would justify drastic measures to protect Philippine democracy. That’s what Filipinos rightly did when the Marcos dictatorship stole the 1986 elections. We should too if the 2016 polls again falls in the hands of the company that handled the past two polls, in which the Comelec dispensed with indispensable, legally mandated PCOS safeguards.