“The initial result of CPU’s investigation in the bidding process of COMELEC revealed that the COMELEC is dealing with questionable and unreliable vendors,” declares Rick Bahague, the National Coordinator of the Computer Professionals’ Union(CPU). “The COMELEC is even more subjected to a triple degree of difficulty to win the trust of Filipino people especially on its effort to automate the national election in 2010,” adds Bahague.
A simple equation can be derived on the gradual revelations of the whole scheme of the COMELEC on the AES: COMELEC’s tarnished credibility and inefficiency + very tight project implementation + questionable and unreliable systems offered by vendors is almost the recipe for disaster. “COMELEC should be ready with back-up plans,” reminds Bahague.
In an initial post on the CPU wiki, http://wiki.cp-union.com, three vendors have histories of unreliable machines as documented on previous national elections in other countries. These are Smartmatic, Sequioa and Election Systems and Software International.
Smartmatic technology was used in Venezuela. Their technology were not open for observations and documentation by a third party.
Smartmatic's former partner Sequioa, has the worst record of AES. During the 2004 Florida election in USA in which Sequioa was used, 100,000 computer errors and 70,000 manual errors were recorded. In the same year in Palm Beach Country, possible insider attacks on Sequioa machines were again documented. Reports showed that machine logs indicated that votes were time and date-stamped two weeks before the elections. Sequioa machines have fraudulent programming, malfunctions in casting votes, dropping ballots from tally, and machines freezing repeatedly according to BlackBoxVoting.Org.
On the other hand, the AES of Election Systems and Software International was denied certification by the California's State Secretary last year. The review discovered a variety of security problems.
In addition, the Scantron, do not have experience in implementing a nationwide election system. What it has done so far are only assessments and survey solutions.
“We are challenging COMELEC on how they will be able to ensure clean and transparent elections if the machines being offered by the vendors are those with documented errors and worse the vendors themselves do not have good track records in running elections,” says Bahague.
“We believe that automation of election could improve our election system but without a credible agency that implements the automated election and having unreliable systems as options, a failure of election might happen,” explains Bahague. “Again, the COMELEC should be prepared with back-up plans.”
CPU will release the updated vendors profile in the coming days.
Ref: http://wiki.cp-union.com/index.php?title=Automated_Elections_System
