No to PCOS TRANSPARENCY OVER SPEED; FILIPINO IT TECH PROPOSED

By Manny Piñol

A former commissioner of the Commission on Elections (COMELEC) and his advocacy group has proposed the use of a hybrid-computerised system, designed by Filipinos, to replace the highly-questionable Precinct Count Optical System (PCOS) operated by a foreign corporation.

August “Gus” Lagman, the IT expert in the COMELEC before he was yanked out following a feud of former Chairman Sixto Brillantes said the Precinct Automated Tallying System (PATAS) will ensure transparency over speed.

“Ang problema ng ating sistema ngayon, yung PCOS, ay yung first step pa lang, hindi natin alam kung tama yung pagkakabilang,” Lagman said.

Lagman’s observation came from hundreds of complaints against the PCOS ranging from the rejection of valid ballots to untransmitted election results because of the failure of the machines to work.

The classic case of the questionable operation of the PCOS was that of former agriculture undersecretary Angelito Sarmiento who ran for Mayor in a Bulacan town in the last elections but whose ballot was rejected by the PCOS three times and rendered invalid.

The incident resulted in the spread of the information that he was not a registered voter of his town and this was one of the reasons which contributed to his loss.

In the 2010 elections, a PCOS machine in Barangay Damalasak, Pikit turned out results of the elections in Colombia, South America, a result of a computer anomaly which was not sufficiently explained by Chairman Brillantes and Smartmatic, the Venezuelan company which sold PCOS to the Philippines.

On Saturday, June 27, the Comelec tested its proposed hybrid election system at the Bacoor National High School in Cavite.

There were 400 volunteers in the mock election using the Precinct Automated Tallying System or PATaS.

There two precincts used in the conduct of the PATAS test.

In one precinct, participants used numbers to choose their candidates while those in the the other precinct wrote the names.

The filled ballots were dropped in a ballot box unlike in the PCOS system where they were fed into the machines which would scan and read the names.

In the PATAS system, the votes are counted manually after the precincts are closed to voting and members of the polling precinct tally the votes in the blackboard in full view of the watchers and recorded by Closed Circuit Television Cameras (CCTV).

The automation starts when the tallied results are transmitted to main servers using laptops with broadband technology.

The CCTVs set up in each of the 300,000 precincts nationwide will allow people to witness the manual counting of votes through the Internet.

Lagman said the hybrid system eliminates the possibility of a wholesale cheating through the manipulation the CF cards.

Lagman also said that in 2013 Midterm Elections where 23% or 8.3 million votes were not transmitted by PCOS machines to the transparency server.

The government will save money using the hybrid system, which is priced at about P4 to P5 billion compare to the PCOS which costs about P9.5 to P14.5 billion.

Comelec Chairman Andres Bautista the Commission will decide whether manual, automated, or hybrid before July ends.

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