ELECTION WATCHDOG ASKS PUBLIC TO JUNK DEFECTIVE PCOS MACHINES

By Joel E. Zurbano/ The Manila Standard

Election watchdog Kontra Daya called on the public to junk the defective voting machines and hold the Commission on Elections and its partner Smartmatic International accountable for undermining the country’s elections.

The group said it would hold a mass action in front of the Comelec office in Intramuros, Manila on Wednesday to demand the dumping of the precinct count optical scan machines technology.

“We call on every one who thinks that we should no longer use the PCOS machines for the next elections and who believes that the Comelec and Smartmatic, the foreign vendor of these defective machines, should be made to account for their actions to join us,” Kontra Daya spokesperson Fr. Joe Dizon said.

The group made the call amid a series of developments that it said affirmed lingering and widespread doubts on the reliability and credibility of the PCOS machines.

The protest call came after Comelec chairman Sixto Brillantes last week admitted that there were discrepancies in the results of the random manual audit and the tallies made by the PCOS machines.

He said that 18,000 PCOS machines suffered transmission problems, or almost a quarter of the 78,000 PCOS machines deployed during the May 13 mid-term elections.

“These admissions are tell-tale signs that the PCOS machines and the ardent proponents of this highly flawed technology, namely the Comelec and Smartmatic, have further compromised the integrity of our long fraudulent and undemocratic elections. There’s no other way to look at it,” Dizon emphasized.

He insisted that the attempts of Brillantes and Smartmatic to downplay these serious problems only increase their liability to the electorate and the general public.

After admitting the discrepancies in the machine and manual count, Brillantes backpedalled and claimed that those were mere “variances†and should be expected.

The poll chief also blamed the weak signal of telecommunication firms for the transmission woes, which the latter vehemently denied.

“Brillantes and the Comelec should be made to account for insisting on this foreign-controlled and very expensive automation technology as well as for covering up its defects. They are also liable for choosing a type of automation that undercuts transparency and produces results that are unverifiable and for doing away with the basic safeguards mandated under the law such as the source code review,” said Dizon.

Source: Manny Piñol