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| CMN LATEST | |
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CenPEG-Center
for People Empowerment in Governance |
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“ Source code of
Smartmatic or the winning bidder should be MADE PUBLIC immediately
to be reviewed and scrutinized by IT professionals in the country
and the general public (not only to “interested political parties,
etc”) for errors, malicious codes and bugs to ensure that it
is incapable of cheating or internal rigging “ was the statement
made by the Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPeg) in
a weekly media forum organized by the Catholic Media Network (CMN)
and CBCP News held at the Ilustrado Restaurant in Intramuros, Manila.
The CenPEG is a public policy center established shortly before the May 2004 elections to help promote people empowerment in governance. CenPEG is especially advocating the democratic representation of the poor. A current policy study thrust of CenPEG is the May 2010 automated elections where its major concern is how to ensure an open, transparent, credible, and voter-participatory elections based on the democratic principle of “secret voting and public counting.” CenPEG alleged that “Comelec is ill-equipped” to implement the complexities of the Precinct Count Optical Scan-Optical Mark Reader (PCOS-OMR), the automated poll process chosen by the Comelec. PCOS-OMR scheme does not fully comply with the principle of “secret voting and public accounting” and has critical faults that may likely result in whole sale electronic cheating. The group said that the automated election system (AES) of Comelec with PCOS-OMR as its core mechanism deprives the voters of their right to know how their votes are counted and how the entire elections result is arrived at. The system virtually removes the requisites of a credible, democratic electoral process: transparency, public scrutiny, public auditability, and public participation. Bobby Tuazon, CenPeg Policy Studies Director, said that the Comelec should have done a wider consultation on what system should be used in automating 2010 election. The UP Professor and computer scientist added, “Although there are good elements inside the Comelec, the poll body is ill-advised and ill-prepared for the May 2010 automated national and local election”. Tuazon presented a study with noted immeasurable cases pointing to the technical deficiencies and weaknesses of the OMR which also manifested when it was pilot tested last August 2008 during the ARMM elections which are at least 23 errors recorded. Another resource person, Maria Corazon N. Akol, member of transparentelections.org.ph, and President of Philippine National IT Standards (PhilNITS) proposed The Open Elections Management System (OEMS) and emphasized that there is Filipino produced technology available which is participatory and while being developed, will ultimately be “owned” by the community. Francis Limgenco, assistant program manager of OEMS made a live demonstration of the proposed system and distributed a CD of the OEMS software. CenPeg made an open letter appeal to Commissioner Jose Armando Melo and asked the Comelec to provide copy of the source code of the PCOS programs the BOC, CCS program for the municipal, provincial, national, and congressional canvass, the Comelec server programs, and to include the source code of the in-house Comelec programs called DCS utilities. And the winning bidder should authorize Comelec to make final source code of the PCOS and CCS and all of its components available and open to all interested party or groups which may conduct their own code review. Also present at the forum were: Atty. Victoria Avena, Professor at UP College of Law and CenPEG Legal Consultant; Dr. Pablo Manalastas, Professor at Ateneo and UP Departments of Computer Science; and Juana Change.
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