Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Election machine reads between the lines

Today, a technical glitch has been exposed in the scanning machines to be used in the Philippine national and local elections in just five days time.

A mock election was held in parts of the Philippines on Monday to test and seal the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines, but the votes didn’t scan correctly.

The PCOS machines were specially designed for this election by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) together in a partnership with Smartmatic and Total Information Management, Philippines (TIM); Smartmatic-TIM.

These glitches come after troubles with humidity affecting PCOS machines were detected during advance overseas voting in Hong Kong last month.

The spokesperson for Smartmatic-TIM Cesar Flores says that the problem was caused by incorrect programming. The test was supposed to prove that the machines worked before they were sealed up ready for the elections. Instead it revealed that the PCOS machines may be rigged.

Not so flashy cards

Each PCOS machine has its own compact flash card specific to its area. These are a little like the SIM card in a mobile phone. The two gigabyte card includes information on the number of registered voters in the area, and the names of candidates for the local elections.

Hand-written ballot paper is scanned into the PCOS machine, where the specific program on the flash card and the software in the machine work together to read the scan. The results are then transmitted via satellite to a secure central server for counting.

During printing, the local forms were adjusted to match the national forms; from a single space to a double. The PCOS machine read the ballot as if it was still single-spaced; and so the machine wrongly allotted votes to some candidates, and skipped others.

“For some reason, the configuration was telling the machine that the second row visually is actually the third row,” says Flores. The next row was read as a “blank space,” he said.

Across the country, 76,300 compact flash cards will need to be recalled and replaced from deep inside the PCOS machines.

The blame game

According to The Daily Inquirer, Smartmatic-TIM has blamed Comelec for the problem because they didn’t want to run tests with the actual voting forms. Comelec are only allowed to print the exact number of ballot papers (50.7 million) per registered voters.

At a nationally televised news conference yesterday, Flores simply blamed the glitches on "human error".

Either way, Smartmatic-TIM is responsible for fixing the problem. With a processing rate of 40 cards per hour in 75 stations (3,000 cards/hour), Flores hopes that 54,000 cards can be reprogrammed in the next 18 hours.

Flores said that it planned to process 31,500 flash cards today. However he also said that 43,000 cards are due to arrive tomorrow on order from Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Comelec Commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal said Smartmatic-TIM had only 20,000 spare flash cards on hand in the Philippines.

Deception through machines?

According to the Nacionalista Party, in six towns on the island of Mindoro (140 km South of Manila), the machines were rigged.

“There were five votes for Villar, five votes for Aquino, but when it came out (in the machine), there were no votes for Villar, no votes for Noynoy and 10 votes for Teodoro,” Nacionalista Party spokesperson and senatorial candidate Gilbert Remulla said.

“Is this automated cheating?” asked Remulla.

Gilberto Teodoro is the preferred Presidential candidate for the administrative party. Supporters of Villar, led by Remulla, have filed a complaint with the Comelec office in Manila.

Henrietta de Villa, chair of the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting, the Comelec’s citizen’s arm says “I will not be honest if I will say that my confidence has not been diminished because, as I said, what will happen next?”.

What will happen next?

Next, the election may either be delayed, it may be a failure or it may not happen at all. There’s sentiment that the chain of problems in the lead up to this election is not coincidence, but an effort to boycott the election. If this election fails, current administration will continue for another six months until a new election is rescheduled.

A strong push to postpone Election Day for two weeks has been re-instigated. There is also a push to reinstate the manual system; however the manual system was abandoned because it provides too many opportunities for corruption.

Originally two additional weeks were allocated for manual counting, now made redundant by automated polling, so there is leeway to allow for a delay to ensure that the election is a success.

Comelec and Smartmatic-TIM have confirmed that they’ll be able to reach their optimistic goal to retrieve and replace all 76,000 flash cards across the archipelago in a few days.

The public has been assured that the problems will be sorted by Sunday – a close call when the elections are on Monday.