… but it seems we still don’t know how to properly address our concerns.
On May 10, this country will be having it’s National Elections. It will also be the first ever automated elections the country will (maybe) have. During the past months, the media has reported on the PCOS machines provided by the group Smartmatic, the printing of ballots and everything else about the planned automated elections.
And yet, there have been several problems along the way, problems that an IT group like Smartmatic should have seen… problems that seem impossible to have been overlooked by the company [unless it was intentional].
The Commission on Elections [COMELEC] is the government agency in charge of the elections and yet they don’t seem to have an idea of what is going on, except what Smartmatic tells them.
Same goes for the media – for all their claims of unbiased, fair coverage, none of the major networks have provided their own independent IT expert to point out or at least explain to the people why we should or should not believe Smartmatic and/or the COMELEC.
And today, just 6 days before the elections another problem has been found – the Compact Flash cards of all the PCOS machines are not properly programmed so they all have to be replaced.
- This should have been seen weeks ago during testing.
- It can be seen as a way of manipulating the results
- why does a machine with so many supposed security features have to use REMOVABLE memory cards to store its programming AND results???
And now they say that it’s to late to ask the COMELEC and Smartmatic to be responsible; and that all we can do is to be vigilant during the elections…
Good luck with that! At least during the manual counting, people cheated with brute force by bring guns and goons… and Filipinos died (in vain) trying to protect those ballots. But how are we going to try to stop electronic cheating?
The media is the only organization I know who can actually try and do something about this. And yet they’re spending their time bragging about which network provided the most ‘unbiased’ news coverage (which no one really cares about). I wish they’d actually use their brains and resources to make a difference.
I’m tired of this government. We need a change. Now.
