Exclusive

By Raissa Robles

The Smartmatic website and official results of our 2010  elections have suddenly vanished from the World Wide Web while we weren’t looking.

Since Friday, I have been looking for www.smartmatic.com and could not access it on the Internet. It was as if it never existed. (I wonder if the telegenic Cesar Flores is still in the country.)

I also tried accessing the results of our recent 2010 elections from the website wwww.ibanangayon.ph

This website is still up.

Ibanangayon.ph website

But when I clicked on the box (shown below) to access the election results down to the precinct level, all I got was a message saying “problem loading page.”

I clicked on this box in the website ibanangayon.ph to view election results and got an error message

I remembered  I could also access the election results through the Commission on Elections website. But when I clicked on electionresults.comelec.gov.ph – through a link provided by Smartmatic – again there was nothing.

So I called a friend, Gerry Kaimo, to ask him to do the same thing. And he came up with the same results: The Smartmatic company website was down and our election results have been wiped clean from the Web.

An hour ago, Ederic Penaflor Eder, editor for Yahoo! Philippines, tweeted me after I had asked him to try to access Smartmatic.com and our election results. Ederic said:

Smartmatic.com is working, but electionresults.comelec.gov.ph and electionresults.ibanangayon.ph are giving me “connection timed out” error.

I  asked him to recheck because Smartmatic.com was giving me a timed out error.

Minutes later, Ederic tweeted back:

Sure. Hmm, I signed out of VPN and now, all sites are giving me “connection timed out” error on Firefox. Weird. Let’s ask Kuya @cesarfz?

I hope Ederic can get through Cesar Flores.

Personally, I am deeply disturbed by this. I had rejoiced to be able to see election results from the national  all the way down to the precinct level for the first time.

What are the implications of this on the dozens of electoral protests that have been filed, including the one that Senator Mar Roxas is about to file against Vice-President Jejomar Binay? Remember that  Cesar Flores once  said – any election fraud leaves a digital trail.

Where’s the digital trail now?

Does the Comelec and the PPCRV have its own copy of the official elections results down to the precinct level or were they relying all along on ibanangayon.ph? I hope not.

Was Smartmatic deeply offended by President Benigno Aquino’s snub of Ms. Transparency and by Congressman Teddy Boy Locsin’s perorations against the company and its officials?

I hope this is not its retaliation.

I hope this teaches us that we cannot outsource our democratic exercise to a foreign corporation.

Let’s make our own automated election system. We have three years to do it.