SMARTMATIC, too smart?

By Alfredo C. Garvida, Jr.

Contributor

The vice presidential race in the May 9, 2016 elections may live in history as the greatest highway robbery that ever occurred on the Philippine soil.

Vice presidential candidate Bongbong Marcos was ahead by almost 900,000 votes over Leni Robredo, his closest rival, at about 12 a.m. of May 10th in the vote quick count. At 3 a.m. his huge lead disappeared and Robredo inched ahead and steadily gained grounds in huge numbers while Marcos' votes remained constant. This unusual movement of the numbers were challenged by a political scientist and a college professor on statistics as highly suspicious and anomalous, contending that even with Ms. Robredo's huge surge upward on the statistical graph during this crucial three-hour span, Bongbong's numbers should have moved up likewise on the graph and not remained constant, as the canvassing quick count results were showing.

Ms. Robredo tried to rationalize her sudden jump—in just three hours—into the lead by saying that the Ilocos Norte senator's almost 1 million lead at 12 a.m. of May 10th was caused by the fact that the early returns came from the Ilocos region, Marcos' bailiwick, which was abruptly wiped out when her bailiwick's returns, the Bicol region's, came in later. 

Her reasoning almost makes sense, except that how did she know the Ilocos returns came ahead of the Bicol returns when the system was not programmed to prioritize a certain region ahead of another in the transmission of votes? If this be the case, were the Ilocos returns then programmed to be reported first so that Bongbong's enemies will know how many votes they will have to catch him up with down the stretch?

This hypothesis is gaining credence because of the unlawful, beyond-protocol intervention during the canvassing of returns made by Mr. Marlon Garcia, a Venezuelan national who heads Smartmatic Philippines—the company that supplied and maintained the Precinct Count Optical Scanner machines (PCOS)—while Bongbong's lead was almost 1 million. He changed the transparency server without the Comelec's en banc knowledge and approval as required by law. After Mr. Garcia's unauthorized intervention, Bongbong's lead came spiraling down until it reached a flat line on the graph, while Leni's votes climbed up rapidly on the same graph. 

The Comelec, Smartmatic, Ms. Robredo and the Liberal Party are one in saying that the breach made by Mr. Garcia did not affect the results of the canvassing, self-serving narratives that may never serve the true spirit of a democratic election if left unquestioned at this time.

Mr. Manny Paloga, an expert on systems programming and analysis has noticed certain flaws on the system vulnerable to manipulations when he visited the PPCRV at the height of the vice presidential canvassing controversy. One of which was that the returns shown on the big screen on TV for public consumption are manually encoded by people off the actual elections returns handed to them. Television clips were showing that kids, as young as 15 to 18 years old, were also involved in that delicate encoding task; not that we distrust their IT perspicacity, for they are acknowledged to be far better than seniors like me on IT matters, but whether they have enough mature dispositions to work on such a gargantuan task of leading the public's mind on who are ahead in the election returns. 

Mr. Paloga also noted that in the absence of a receipt number on the voting receipt that the voter gets after he has cast his vote, the audit trail for that ballot is lost, which means that it is possible to generate numbers from unknown machines for the receiving machine to report. These hypothetical assumptions would not be nagging the public conscience now had Smartmatic been protocol observant and genuinely obedient to our election law. 

That Mr. Marlon Garcia, Smartmatic's project manager in the Philippines, was involved in the same illegal systems' invasion stunt back in the 2013 elections, per media report, only deepens with good reason the public's suspicion that Senator Bongbong Marcos was cheated in the elections of May 9, 2016. 

The ghost of President Noynoy Aquino's public pronouncement early on that he will do everything within his power to prevent Mr. Marcos from winning the vice presidency is now haunting the public's conscience with all these episodes that occurred at the quick count level. This column was informed by a highly reliable source that about a week before the elections, Aquino and certain billionaire power brokers went into a secret negotiation to thwart the election of Mayor Rodrigo Duterte to the presidency. Aquino's non-negotiable condition was to prevent Bongbong Marcos as well from winning the vice presidency. They were to convince Sen. Grace Poe to withdraw from the presidential race and throw her support to Sec. Mar Roxas "to narrow the survey gap between Duterte and Roxas to a manageable level." Meanwhile, Mr. Roxas at that point audaciously announced to the media that the race was now between him and Duterte, regardless that Ms. Poe has not yet agreed to acquiesce to their ghoulish plot. 

Ms. Poe of course stood pat on her integrity; she refused to cooperate; Mr. Roxas could not close on Duterte's lead, the Davao City mayor's election to the presidency henceforth became just a matter of formality; but the deal on Bongbong had to stay. Which morbidly explains now why the human intervention on the system was made while Bongbong was almost a million votes ahead of Leni. Which also explains why the "?" mark initially took the place of the letter “ñ”—to give some smart guy from Smartmatic reason to manually intervene in the system, "when needed?" Which also explains why Leni Robredo knew that the Ilocos votes came in first and the Bicol votes later, although the system was not programmed to prioritize any region over another in reporting.

Congressman Jonathan dela Cruz, the brainy political adviser of Bongbong, has branded this impasse on the vice presidential race as the product of electronic "dagdag-bawas," or vote increasing and shaving. His assertion makes sense if what were earlier reported in the media that some hundreds of thousands of votes from two winning senatorial candidates were inexplicably shifted to the votes of another winning senatorial candidate are true. 

Leni is spinning that what had happened in 1986—when the election canvassers allegedly walked out to protest attempts by Marcos people to subvert the election results--should not be repeated this time around. This writer admires profoundly the Lady from Camarines Sur's call—if such is directed at President Aquino, who possesses the power to manipulate the results, not Bongbong. Leni's stunt is understandably mind-conditioning, but this writer would wish she knew how to unleash her rhetoric in rhyme with reality.

Realistically, Bongbong's chance at Congress, which has the sole power to canvass and declare the winning candidates for president and vice president, is slim and none. Because PNoy and the Liberal Party still control this branch of the government. But the fight to seek the truth must not end with congress, for the good of the country and to find out if Smartmatic was a good provider of our election machines or the biggest premeditating murderer of our right to democratically choose our leaders.