HALAL Statement: Smartmatic ballot production software was not certified

HALAL STATEMENT Last April 30, in response to a request by candidate Joey de Venecia III, the Comelec made public a set of documents relating to the source code review of the Smartmatic software conducted by SysTest Labs Inc. One of the documents was “Certification Test Summary for AES May 2010 Rev. 1.00”, dated March [...]

Smartmatic machines are not so smart after all

We are spending P7.2 billion to lease these “smart automatic” machines. It turns out that they are not so smart after all. In fact, they seem downright stupid. They can’t recognize a check mark or a cross. They can’t recognize ballpen or pencil marks. They need full, dark shadings to be convinced that you want [...]

HALAL analysis of recently-released SysTest source code review

Halalang Marangal (HALAL) recently obtained a copy of the SysTest report on the source code review of the Smartmatic software that it conducted Oct. 26, 2009 to Feb. 9, 2010. This review was the basis for the Comelec concluding that the Smartmatic Automated Election System will count our May 10 votes properly, securely and accurately. [...]

The issue: failure of automation, not failure of election

The issue is not a failure of election, but a failure of automation. “Failure of election” is a narrow legal term describing a rare situation. The Omnibus Election Code defines it as a situation in which “the election in any polling place has not been held on the date fixed, or had been suspended before [...]

PCOS machines in Philippine automated elections: failure rates, error rates

According to the news, two of the twenty PCOS machines in Hongkong stopped working for a while. That is a 10% failure rate. Cesar Flores of Smartmatic claims they expect a PCOS failure rate of 0.3- 0.5%. However, vendor claims must be taken with a grain of salt, more so if their goods were hurriedly [...]

May 10 election automation: can data-substitution happen during transmission?

There are several entry points for election cheats under the election automation project of the Comelec. We will focus here on the transmission phase. Every precinct counting machine (PCOS) is supposed to transmit its electronic Election Return (e-ER) to the three upstream servers: the municipal canvassing server, the KBP-PPCRV-political parties server, and the Comelec central [...]

Bypassing precinct election officials in the May 10 automated elections: open invitation to fraud

If there is still doubt whether or not the Philippines is heading towards a chaotic election, Comelec Resolution No. 8786 erases all doubt. This resolution promulgated on March 4, 2010, is entitled “Revised General Instructions for the Board of Election Inspectors (BEI) on the Voting, Counting, and Transmission of Results in Connection With the 10 [...]

Automated elections in the Philippines: 25% probability of success as of March 8

On March 8, Smartmatic came out with full-page ads in several national newspapers, claiming that the Automated Election System (AES) project they are implementing for the Philippine government have the people’s vote of confidence. We at Halalang Marangal sat down to discuss the ad and realized that all the information contained there, analyzed carefully and [...]

Back to blogging: the mathematics of election audits

This is just to get into the habit again. I haven’t posted anything for sometime, due pressures of work and study. With this post, I intend to become a regular once more. I made a presentation yesterday Feb. 27 at the Institute of Mathematics in U.P. Diliman, before some 15 mathematicians. The presentation was arranged [...]

Despite Obama’s victory, problems with electronic voting machines should not be ignored

With Obama’s landslide victory over McCain in the 2008 U.S. presidential elections, I hope the problems of electronic voting will not be buried under the euphoria. U.S. media had been filled with all kinds of problems involving voting machines. These problems clearly indicated a trend of errors favoring McCain. There were so many reports in [...]

Electronic voting, electronic cheating?

When I was awarded a six-week research fellowship by the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute, I chose to focus on electronic voting. (The term more commonly used in the Philippines is “automated elections”.) My research confirmed my initial suspicion that electronic voting and counting machines bring their own set of troubles. I realized that the [...]

Oxford Visit

I am currently at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) in the UK doing research on election modernization (including automation). Hopefully, my research can help the Philippine government in making the right decisions as it tries to automate the August 2008 regional elections in Muslim Mindanao and the May 2010 presidential elections. I made my first [...]