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.

A light feature

By Raissa Robles

Next to President-elect Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III and his youngest sister Kris, his girlfriend Shalani Soledad will probably be the third most watched person at the inauguration.

Ms. Shalani

The reasons are obvious. The reelected councilwoman of Valenzuela City looks lovely especially in a severe black dress. Not a few felt awkward at seeing her seated seemingly all alone in the back row of the VIP section during her boyfriend’s proclamation in Congress. While her boyfriend’s four sisters all sat on the front row.

The Aquino family may not be aware that the fact that President Noy has a girlfriend, and a fetching one at that, blunted criticisms against him during the campaign that he was not macho enough to lead the country. (The electorate must really have a twisted sense of right and wrong when it comes to passion. Look at Vice-President Jojo Binay. His ratings shot up after those photos came out showing him with a woman looking younger than his daughter.)

Ms. Shalani played the same role that Imelda Marcos once played for Ferdinand Marcos in the 1965 presidential polls. I believe that while the Aquino sisters, especially Kris, were President Noynoy’s heavy artillery against negative propaganda, Ms. Shalani was the sniper rifle that shot clean and through many a male voter’s heart.

To prove what I’m saying, let me show you below a photo I took inside the office of a male senior government official. The official proudly displayed this photo in his office even before the start of the campaign, and damn the consequences on his career. Doesn’t the woman on the left  look mighty familiar?

Ms. Shalani with senior government official - PHOTO of photo by Raissa Robles

The Noynoy-Shalani romance has publicly played out like a Korean telenovela, where sad, aging bachelor meets girl who is a generation younger. Then things complicate their relationship, such as the presidency of a country.

Let me put it this way, if Ms. Shalani had dumped him at the height of the campaign that would have been the end of him.

So where will Ms. Shalani stay during her boyfriend’s inauguration?

The public will be keenly watching, I told the inauguration spokesman, Manolo
Quezon, as I asked him that question.

He said he had been asked that same question. He replied:

Honestly, I don’t know (the answer). It’s never been discussed in any of the discussions I’ve been in. All I can say is that the protocol for her would be no different from any official of her rank.

Officially speaking, as the girlfriend, she has no official standing in (state) protocol.

[Somehow when Quezon said that, I could hear his brain whirring as he shifted roles from political columnist to event spokesman.]

Trying to be helpful in ascertaining her standing vis-a-vis the would-be president, I asked: “Are they engaged?”

“I have absolutely no idea,” Quezon said.

“Is she sporting a diamond ring or an engagement ring?”

“I do not know,” he said. I appreciated his frankness.

He added:

In the proclamation in Congress you noticed she was not sitting with the family. Again, in a sense, that’s following protocol. She has no official standing as a partner. I think her presence was enough. That’s my personal opinion. Both she and the President-elect are very careful to observe proprieties.

My personal opinion, the reason the partner of a head of state can’t be given more prominence, there is no legally binding relationship. You would have to imagine – going as far back as the era of monarchies – no one gave precedence to the girlfriend.

I bought his explanation until fellow writer Gemma Luz Corotan pointedly wrote on Facebook why she was personally turned off by Ms. Shalani’s physical separation from her boyfriend’s kin during the congressional proclamation. She wrote (and I’m quoting
this with her permission):

Would be interesting to see P-Noy turn into a MAN, the sort of man into whose hands I can put my life on and say,”Take it. It’s yours. I trust you.”

Guy can’t even stand by his girlfriend and puts her in the Goddamn fourth row while Boy Abunda simpers in front. God, this actually makes me angry.:

To Gemma, who is in the throes of love herself, state protocol should take a back seat to LOVE.

And Gemma is right. Boy Abunda is NOT FAMILY and therefore, state protocol was
broken in Congress for FRIENDSHIP. So why the heck not for LOVE?

This afternoon, during the briefing for media  on the inauguration,  I had wanted to ask Noy volunteer Jing Magsaysay where TV talk show host Boy Abunda would be seated at the inauguration but decided not to. I did not want to give my blog entry away to the rapacious press. Ooops, am I one of them? Not all the time.

One media man did ask during the briefing whether Ms. Shalani would be holding
the bible while President Noy took his oath of office. Jing Magsaysay and Sonny Coloma both expressed ignorance on the matter. Ignorance is the better part of valor.

Quezon told me:

Doña Aurora held the bible for (daughter) Cory (Aquino). I would think the logical person would be (his sister) Ballsy. But that would be up to the family to decide. There’s been no official word on the matter.

Just a thought, even if Ms Shalani has no standing in state protocol, her well-being and safety has now become a  state matter since she impacts on the presidency.

How deliciously complicated

Still, Ms. Shalani must be aware that her boyfriend has suddenly become the most sought-after bachelor in the country.

And did you notice, he has nearly lost that nerdy look and now has a more commanding presence?

Just imagine – Dayana Mendoza, the 2008 Miss Universe and Miss Venezuela, recently cooed to him on national TV -  let’s have coffee:

Please just take a little bit of your time. I know you’re super busy to say ‘hi’ to me. Now that I’m in the Philippines. I’d love to meet you.

Transparent Dayana in an Ad

Smartmatic’s Cesar Flores tried to nudge the President-elect into a date by saying she was their Ambassador for Transparency. You could detect a lecherous leer when he said the word “transparency”.

This prompted one mobile phone texter to ask radio station DZMM whether Smartmatic was “pimping” (binubugaw) Miss Venezuela.

President Noy politely rejected Miss Venezuela, and in so doing, publicly reaffirmed his love for Miss Valenzuela.

Oh, how deliciously complicated this presidency is going to be with all that loving.

There’s one possible way to test the accuracy of the automated voting, at least for the national positions.

We could make the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines count the votes cast so far in Hong Kong and even in Singapore. At the same time, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) will do a manual count of the same votes.

Comelec can also do something to make voters put some trust in those PCOS machines: Order Smartmatic to enable the PCOS to issue every voter a “receipt” so each voter can check immediately afterward if the machine recorded the votes correctly. The receipts are not to be taken home or be shown to the vote buyers, as what Comelec spokesman James Jimenez warned would happen.

And Smartmatic, please explain why your explanation for the recent fiasco does not jive with the proof I have below.

Voters have no way of knowing their votes were counted

The problem with this election is that at the precinct level, there is no way that voters will know their votes were counted. All we voters will get is a “Congratulations” message on the screen of the PCOS machine and that’s it. After the polls close down, there is no manual counting of the votes – a practice that has been in place since this Republic was born.

Jimenez recently shot down Ted Failon and Pinky Webb’s proposal over DZMM to have the PCOS issue a “receipt” to voters just like the way banks issue one after a deposit or withdrawal, or supermarkets issue one after payment is made.

Jimenez said:

This is not a bank. So the analogy is very wrong. Pag nagbagsak ka ba ng balota mo sa ballot box may resibo ka ba? (When you drop a ballot in a ballot box are you issued a receipt?) As a security feature, it doesn’t do anything. It will probably satisfy you personally. It is not even a very good psychological comfort for you because it was very easy to fool. It was very easy to fake.

For instance, he said,

Bibigyan ko instructon ang makina – but still count the wrong ballot. In the end nadaya ka rin.(I could give an instruction to the machine to show your votes correctly but still count your ballot wrong. In the end, you would be cheated.)

I told former Comelec chairman Christian Monsod this explanation by Jimenez. Why Monsod, you’d probably ask. Because among all the Comelec chairmen I’ve covered since Leonardo Perez (the one who rigged the 1986 snap election of dictator Ferdinand Marcos), I find Monsod the most credible since he came out financially poorer from the stint.

Anyway, Monsod told me in his usual blunt way:

Don’t listen to James. On that issue, I think that’s a poor excuse. Sometimes James Jimenez goes off in tangent on these issues inventing excuses. And that’s a poor one.

That’s why former poll chair Christian Monsod also wants a “receipt”

Monsod explained it was actually part of our automation law to have a “voter verified precinct paper audit trail (VVPPAT).” In short, the same receipt that Jimenez said should not be done. Monsod told me:

That is not going to be done although that’s in the law.The original plan was for voters to look at it (the “receipt”) and put it in a separate box before they leave the precinct. That was never intended to bring out.

Monsod explained that the “receipt” was intended to be used in the random manual counting when the polls close down.

He added:

The real reason (they don’t want to issue the receipt is) they would have to configure the manufacturing of the equipment. It costs a lot of money to do it.

Isn’t that what they are doing right now because of their stupid mistake with the ballots and the CF (Compact Flash) cards? If it’s their mistake, it’s ok to spend our money. If it’s what civilians ask for, it can’t be done. That’s the attitude of Comelec and Smartmatic so far.

I told Monsod that the Comelec today reminds me of the Comelec under Leonardo Perez.

I also told Monsod that (issuing “receipts”) is precisely what Smartmatic did in Venezuela when it introduced automated voting in 2006. The Wikipedia entry on the electoral exercise said :

After the vote is cast, each machine prints out a paper ballot, or VVPAT, which is inspected by the voter and deposited in a ballot box belonging to the machine’s table.

Later, these paper ballots were tallied in a random manual audit.

Why can’t we do the same here? Do a random but comprehensive parallel manual audit this way because we can assume that whatever is tallied by the PCOS are all reflected in those “receipts.”

The “receipts” in turn have been VERIFIED by the voter himself right after casting his vote. If there’s a discrepancy between the “receipts” and the PCOS summary for that precinct, then we can rightly assume that the PCOS did not count the votes correctly in that precinct.

Again James Jimenez, didn’t Smartmatic tell Comelec that it issued such “receipts” to voters in Venezuela?

Proof that Smartmatic is not telling the whole truth about what went wrong

Smartmatic’s explanation for why their PCOS could not even do simple addition that my grade schooler son can do mentally does not wash.

Smartmatic officer Cesar Flores said in the hastily called press conference with Comelec Tuesday (May 4) that during the printing of the ballots, the spacing of the local ballot face (the back of the ballot) was adjusted to double space from single space. The single space was the formatting used for the national contests, he said.

Both Comelec and Smartmatic officials said nothing wrong was detected with the counting of votes for the national position.

Only the votes for the local position were affected and Flores’ explanation was that the change from single space to double space for the local ballot face was not included in the compact flash card. Because of this, he said the PCOS machine read the back side where candidates for the local elections were printed as if it still had a single-space format, causing the machine to wrongly allot votes to certain candidates or skip other
names.

He said:

The flash cards inside the PCOS were not able to locate certain candidates to positions. For some reason, the configuration was telling the machine that the second row visually is actually the third row.

The next row was read as a “blank space,” he said.

This explanation does not seem to jive with the reality

When Smartmatic and Comelec snubbed the Foreign Corresopndents Association of the Philippines last February, Smartmatic sent over a middle level officer named Miguel Avila to demonstrate the PCOS using their sample ballots then. Fortunately, I snapped a few photos of the ballot.

This is how the ORIGINAL BALLOT looked. Notice that the front page – where the national candidates are printed – was a mixture of single space (for president, vice-president and senators) and double space (for party-list). The  names were also printed vertically.

Smartmatic used this sample ballot in mock polls with FOCAP - Photo by Raissa Robles

This is how the back page of the ORIGINAL  BALLOT looked. Notice that the names of all the local candidates were also printed in single space and positioned vertically.

This is the back page, where local candidates' names are printed, of the sample ballot used by Smarmatic with FOCAP last February - Photo by Raissa Robles

After  Comelec’s drastic redesign, both  the FRONT AND BACK of the original ballot changed dramatically.

Last Saturday, our barangay gave out samples of the newly redesigned ballot. See below how the front page containing the names of the national candidates changed.  Notice that the names of the national candidates are  NOW ALL DOUBLE SPACE and laid out horizontally. It’s a very drastic redesign of the original ballot.

Front page of actual 2010 ballot - PHOTO by Raissa Robles

The back page containing the names of the local candidates now look like this. Notice that the names of the local candidates are now DOUBLE SPACE and laid out horizontally. Also a drastic redesign.

Back page of actual 2010 ballot showing local candidates - PHOTO BY Raissa Robles

What I would like to ask Smartmatic and Comelec is this:  Why is it that your CF cards were able to read the newly and drastically redesigned FRONT PAGE of the ballot containing the names of the national candidates, but were unable to read the BACK PAGE containing the names of the local candidates?

What are you not telling us?

Another thing that struck me during the Focap “non-briefing” – Miguel Avila gave out sample ballots to fill out and his instructions were to fill out ONLY THE FRONT PAGE, not the back page. I found that odd then.

This fiasco makes me wonder whether all this time Smartmatic and Comelec have been testing only the front page of the ballot where the national candidates are printed and NEVER the back page where the local candidates are printed.

The implications of this fiasco

I am proposing the advanced counting of the Singapore and Hong Kong votes to test the system. This would not affect the process as a whole. Whatever is counted can just be added manually to the national count later on. If you think that would create trending, think of the more serious implications of the current situation.

The ENTIRE PROCESS of the automated polls has now become suspect and questionable. Smartmatic claims only the votes for the local candidates were scrambled. But Nacionalista Party sokesman Gilbert Remulla made serious allegations Tuesday (May 4) that in one instance of testing, votes for NP presidential candidate Manuel Villar disappeared.

According to the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Remulla showed reporters a tally sheet from a PCOS machine and a parallel manual count:

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. Is this automated cheating?

You know what this means?, my hubby Alan told me at the breakfast table. He said this lays the basis for an election protest that could hold up the proclamation of the new president. I agreed.

He nudged me to write this on my blog, which is why I’m writing this. That the victory of whoever wins, based on the automated polls, could be forever marred by this. And then we will again have six years of a presidency with a questionable mandate from the people.

That’s too high a price to pay which I for one am not willing to pay. If that happens, I will add my voice to that of retired military chief Angelo Reyes who raged during Comelec and Smartmatic’s presscon that those responsible should be “hanged”. Not only hanged, I say, but drawn and quartered the medieval way.

Veteran journalist Ellen Tordesillas found your letter (see below) , hiring her services, “strange” and insulting.

From the tenor of your letter, I’m sure Ellen was NOT the only journalist you wrote to. Which brings me to my point – that the Commission on Elections (Comelec) should deeply delve into your proposal.

Ellen, the woman named Samira Saba is real and she is Smartmatic’s Communications Manager based in Caracas, Venezuela. The press release below from Smartmatic Venezuela quotes Senora Saba:

In your Malaya column, Ellen, you called Smartmatic a “Dutch firm”. This is what Smartmatic has always wanted the Filipino public to believe. But in reality, it remains very much a Venezuelan firm, and merely uses the Netherlands as a convenient address. Here is the link to their board of directors – http://www.smartmatic.com/company/board-of-directors/

Also, if you recall, Smartmatic sent to the Senate inquiry their very handsome, gorgeous-looking telenovela-type company officers and not one of them was Dutch. All spoke with a heavy Latin American accent that makes listeners think they’re romancing the English language.On the face of it, Smartmatic’s proposal to Ellen (and most probably to other Filipino journalists) appears aboveboard. The company needs writers, and therefore they want to hire someone very credible like Ellen.

But there are some insinuations Senora Saba make about you, Ellen. For instance, Senora Saba states: “If you are interested in adding our organization as a regular client for your freelance writer services, we can define the extent and number of articles you could write monthly.”

Senora Saba presumes Ellen’s body of writing is all paid for by regular clients of “your freelance writer services.” Tsk, tsk. She doesn’t seem to know you could make a hell of a lot of money writing the very opposite of what you are publishing right now.

Senora Saba is also very helpful. She wants to hire Ellen to write about “Smartmatic technology in particular” and then adds that if Ellen agrees, “in this case, we would of course furnish appropriate materials to the required depth.”

Smartmatic wants Ellen to do PR work for them. Nothing wrong with PR. Trouble is, Senora Saba should have hired a PR agency, and not gone to Ellen.

Which makes me wonder what Smartmatic KNOWS and DOESN’T KNOW about how an automated election is supposed to work in a democracy. The Philippines, for all its flaws, prides itself as being run NOT IN THE WAY Hugo Chavez runs Venezuela, where Smartmatic has played a significant role legitimizing Chavez’s authoritarian rule.

Over the past several days, I must confess, I have had arguments with certain people over how credible Smartmatic is in conducting a very crucial election for the Philippines next year.. It was impressed upon me very clearly by two people (whom I will not name except to say they are in the know) that Smartmatic would be crazy to smear its name and brand worldwide by conducting a fraudulent election here next year. The two added that if there is any cheating that would be done, it would not come from Smartmatic.

Another person, whom I talked to, said Smartmatic was not doing what it had originally agreed to do – that is, educate the stakeholders about its product. Stakeholders mean – the voters and those who will directly be in charge of the voting machines. The source did not mean PR either. But actual training for these various stakeholders on the ground down to the grassroots level. The source described the Smartmatic machines as “just like a fax machine” that transmits data electronically.

Now, Smartmatic’s letter makes me wonder if the company knows how a democratic election is supposed to work. I mean, it’s very basic. You don’t hire journalists to do PR for you.

I know Filipino politicians do it all the time – hire working journalists to write PR pieces for them disguised as news. That’s what Smartmatic wants Ellen to do.

That’s not how the fourth estate – journalism – is supposed to work if it is to serve the public. Filipino readers have the right to know whether what they are reading as news was really gathered by the writer to the best of his or her ability and fairness of judgement and not because she was secretly hired by a third party.

Tell you what, Smartmatic, hire all the journalists in Manila and the provinces that you want. But publicly release the roster of your hired help. Fair for you, fair for the journalists who want to earn more, and fair for the reading public who read their write-ups.

Hasta luego, Samira.

_______________________________

Ellen’s Malaya column – October 12, 2009

Smartmatic’s insulting proposal

LAST Friday, I got this strange letter from a certain Samira Saba of Smartmatic, the Dutch firm that partnered with the local Total Information Management and won the P7.2 billion contract for the nationwide automation of the 2010 elections.

Here’s the letter:

Dear Mrs. Ellen

“My name is Samira Saba and I work at Smartmatic as the Marketing and Communications Manager (www.smartmatic.com).

“I have checked your blog and I find it quite interesting. I can see the articles published are responsible, and show that you as a rule strive to inform and educate your readers. For instance, the article “Rock the vote!”

“I would like to know if you have the time and the interest of writing some articles regarding the following subjects:

1) Election automation worldwide, and positive experiences in various countries.

2) Election automation in the Philippines, past and present.

3) Different technologies to automate an election. Perspectives and comparisons: shortcomings, advantages, political implications.

4) Smartmatic technology in particular (in this case, we would of course furnish appropriate materials to the required depth).

“If you are interested in adding our organization as a regular client for your freelance writer services, we can define the extent and number of articles you could write monthly. I will be glad to give you more details and answer the questions you may have.

“If your answer to the above is positive, then I would appreciate a quotation for your services, with a target of two articles published per month to begin with.

“I look forward to hearing from you the soonest.”

It was signed by Ms. Saba.

I find the letter insulting. It smacks of bribery. I had to take several deep breaths and reminded myself that I should not write anything when I’m angry.

Saturday, I replied, asking her “What and where in my articles gave you the idea that my services are for sale?”

I’m still waiting for her reply.