… 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.
Interesting and disturbing to read this, Rygel. I hope your country gets a fair election and the change needed. Politics are ugly everywhere it seems....
ReplyDeleteWow and I thought they've been testing the machines since early this year. Grrr kung ganyan dapat balik yung binayad ng gobyerno. This sucks and i agree with your opinion.
ReplyDeleteoh they've been testing it... that's what makes this a lot more ... fishy
ReplyDeleteDi ba may experience naman Smartmatic sa ibang bansa? Bat parang it's news to them na pag may binago sa simple spacing ng printed ballot e dapat ireconfigure din ang program installed sa CF cards? Laking oversight naman nun. Tapos nakita lang with only a few days to go before election pa.
ReplyDeleteActually, having the removable memory makes a lot of sense. For starters, having the software on a removable memory card makes updating the machine's code much easier. You just stick in a new memory card. (Of course, I might consider still having the program on non-removable memory and simply provide a way to pull a new software image off the removable card when you want to update.
ReplyDeleteSimilarly, having the voting results on a removable memory card means that you can transport those results to a new location easily for verification, recounting, and so on. This is especially helpful if you want to have a centralized system do the final tabulation. It can simply suck the individual machine's results off the memory card and process them.
You have a point there... and that's exactly what happened
ReplyDelete*nods* I kinda figured as much. I've never worked on voting machines, but I've done enough programming and development for embedded devices that I'm pretty knowledgeable about design considerations.
ReplyDeleteWell, based on the article Rygel linked to, it sounds like this is an entirely new system. That actually confuses me, as there are obviously systems current in existence to do this sort of thing and that have already been through extensive testing.
ReplyDeleteTruth be told, testing for this kind of system can take several months to over a year. (Depending on the complexity of the system, it can and should take multiple years.) You not only have test each individual component (server, individual machines, etc), but you need to do integration testing to make sure they all play well together. And since you have multiple machines connecting to a central server, there's testing that needs to be done for that.
Heck, I expect even writing the test plan would take a couple of months. And that's before you get to the actual testing.