Election watchdog Kontra Daya – Southern Mindanao Region (SMR) said it anticipates massive voter disenfranchisement on Monday’s national and local election.
In a statement, Kontra Daya – SMR convenor Kim Gargar said in their observation during the final testing and sealing (FTS) of the Voting Counting Machine (VCM) last week, there might potential delaying factors which needs to extend the voting time.
Gargar said the Commission on Elections (Comelec) admitted that the implementation of the so-called voter receipt will entail an additional 4 hours to the total voting time.
“This means that the 800 maximum voters to be accommodated for the 12-hour voting process will now need a total of 16 hours to complete the voting process,” he said.
He said if voting will not be extended, then only around 600 voters can be accommodated. This is a conservative estimate since other problems noticed during FTS and which can arise on actual election day will cause further delay.
Gargar said the group noted that the initialization report and the first few paper audit trail or the “vote receipt” were not printed correctly and contain some unreadable parts due to paper jam. It was only resolved after several attempts by Board of Election Inspectors (BEI) to adjust the position of the thermal paper.
He said The Smartmatic-Comelec-trained technicians were not able to answer several technical problems encountered during FTS. For instance, some technicians cannot immediately resolve the paper jam, which was resolved by the BEIs after a trial and error procedure.
“Another instance was the comment of some BEIs in another clustered precinct saying the technician assigned to them is unreliable,” he said.
He said during the diagnostic phase of FTS, The BEI Companion and the VCM Technician Handbook give different prescriptions.
“In BEI’s, diagnostic tests include Transmission Diagnostic, which expectedly would be unsuccessful because the servers (Transparency, Central, and CBOC) are not yet active,” he said.
Gargar said the BEIs spent more than 30 minutes to finish the test. However, if the technician’s would be followed, there should be no Transmission Diagnostic during the FTS.
He said during FTS, there was no way to test this as transmission diagnostic was unsuccessful—there were no servers yet to receive transmissions from VCMs.
“The FTS does not include a test for transmitting the ERs. Thus, there is no way to know if transmission of ERs will be successful come election time, nor are we assured that the transmitted ERs will be digitally signed as mandated by the automated election law.”
there were already disenfranchisement effected when Comelec revised the voters list because of biometrics requirements,” he said.
Gargar said their group also noticed that digital signatures used during FTS, according to BEIs, are the same codes that will be used on May 9.
“This means that the codes are already open to the public as the whole FTS process was observed by all interested parties,” he said.
He said the five-digit digital signatures are already compromised. That the digital signatures are compromised is bolstered by the fact that these codes were made by Smartmatic-Comelec.
“Some guys in Smartmatic-Comelec who have access to these codes could use this codes to tamper the transmitted ERs.
Gargar said the proper way of securing transmission of ERs is for Comelec to enable this feature, compel BEIs to change the digital signatures provided by Smartmatic-Comelec with a different one of their own choosing, and use that on actual election day.
“Of course, this all depends on the reliability of the entire transmission protocol, which we have no way of knowing because there was no acceptable source code review conducted,” he said. Armando B. Fenequito Jr.
