CITIZEN’S FORUM FOR CREDIBLE ELECTIONS

Introduction

The Concerned Citizen’s Movement (CCM) held a forum entitled “Citizen’s Forum for Credible Elections” last December 7, 2009, 12:00PM – 3:00PM, at the Club Filipino, Greenhills, San Juan.

The forum was a part of a series of dialogues aimed to provide a venue for discussion among various sectors on the legal and technical issues of the May 2010 elections. It also aims to generate broad public awareness on election issues in order for them to be more vigilant and ensure that the entire electoral process is credible and that whoever will win can indeed be proclaimed without an air of doubt.

This forum featured presentations from NBN-ZTE whistle blower Eng. Jun Lozada, IT expert Mr. Gus Lagman and the representative of Atty. Harry Roque, Atty. Gilbert Andres.

The attendees were from different citizens groups, political parties and media organizations such as Bangon Pilipinas, JEEP ni Erap, Coalition for Hope, Education for Life Foundation, Global Call to Action against Poverty Phils, Diwata Society and Kilusan para sa Makabansang Ekonomiya.

Highlights of the Forum

The forum started with Betina Legarda of CCM introducing the forum and sharing with the participants that they were conducting these series of forums as early as March this year, among civil society organizations, schools and IT groups. However, she pointed out that in the many instances they tried to present their alternatives, COMELEC has either provided unclear/indefinite answers or has just ignored them.

Jun Lozada presented a process review of the automation contract versus the actual preparations of COMELEC. In his presentation, he noted several discrepancies in the contract versus what is actually being conducted by COMELEC. These include:

• The dependence on GPRS transmission when there is no communications provider capable of covering all the clustered precincts;
• The supposed satellite-based back-up for transmission when in the list of equipments and budgets, no satellite phone or link is listed;
• The absence of Point of Transaction Acknowledgement by the PCOS that should be a standard on any electronic transaction to ensure credibility and security; and,
• The capability of the IT infrastructure and personnel of COMELEC to carry out the required technical preparations as a result of inconsistent or unfavorable provisions in the contract.

He pointed out that the way COMELEC is handling the preparations and the manner by which they respond to valid questions does not inspire trust among the electorate and doubts if the May 2010 automated elections can indeed be credible. He ended his presentation by saying that “we cannot automate trust”.

Gus Lagman, an IT expert presented unresolved technical issues regarding the automated election system, among these are:

• the certification of the source codes of the PCOS;
• the high probability of embedding malicious codes in the machines;
• the security of using common CF cards as storage for results that can easily be tampered, altered or destroyed;
• the high probability of “public voting, secret counting” as opposed to the “private voting, public counting” that should be observed, since the ballots will be physically too long to hide and watchers or BEIs can easily see the votes cast;
• the risk of erroneous printing of ballots since there will be around 1,631 versions of the ballot;
• the erroneous delivery of ballots considering that these will be machine specific and limited to 1 per voter;
• the training of needed personnel from the trainors to the onsite technicians to the BEIs

He said that with the way things are going, the probability of failure is extremely high. He then presented a possible alternative that he describes as simpler, more transparent and less expensive called the Open Election System. Under this system, he said that the voting and precinct counting will still be manual but the canvassing will be automated.

Atty. Gilbert Andres, (representing Atty. Harry Roque), presented unresolved legal questions on COMELEC’s actions, from the awarding of the contract to SMARTMATIC-TIM to specific provisions of the Poll Automation Law. He cited various provisions that the COMELEC have not complied with such as providing open access to stakeholders and independent IT professionals to check the source code to be used in the PCOS.

He also gave an update on their group’s initiative to question the declaration of martial law in Maguindanao at the Supreme Court.

During the open forum, most of the participants expressed alarm on why the COMELEC continues to ignore the proposals of different groups and why the information shared by the resource persons were not made public. The following are the resolutions of the forum:

• Continue organizing similar forums wth various sectors to raise public awareness on the issues;
• Request for a public dialogue with COMELEC where concrete proposals can be put forward and where the public can ask the COMELEC to bare the Calendar of Activities and inform them where the preparations are really are;
• Circulate the presentations of the resource persons in the web; and,
• Request for media’s assistance in finding out from COMELEC exactly what stage of the preparations they really are.