The automated election system that will be used on Monday is a complex collection of several component subsystems that is expected to function as one during election day. These subsystems are expected to pass on verified tallies of the results at each stage of the polling process. If any one of them fail, there would be problems with regard to the veracity of the final count and tally that will be used as the basis for proclaiming winners of the electoral contest.

Much like the quote that the strength of a chain is as strong as its weakest link, the automated election system as implemented by the Comelec and Smartmatic has several weak points in their chain.

Over the weekend, Kontra-daya, a citizens anti-fraud and election monitoring group, has obtained copies of the certification of the Technical Evaluation Committee (TEC) of the Comelec with regard to the PCOS machines and a copy of the SysTest Labs source code review of the programs to be used in the elections. What is common between the two documents is that parts of the election system, namely the central server, its backup, the KBP server, the public website and various firmware and tools were not certified both by the TEC and SysTest.

SysTest has detailed out problems that its experts encountered in their source code review. These problems range from failure to document important parts of the source code to security issues to untrusted libraries used by the programmers of Smartmatic. Copies of these documents can be found at the kontradaya.org and votereportph.org websites.

The implication of this non-certification is that we will not be sure that these subsystems will work as expected come election time. The central server is where the tallies will be processed at the national level. If that server (a computer) and its backup fail then the whole system becomes prone to the dagdag-bawas machinations in the canvassing of the votes. The KBP server also receives the precinct reports from the PCOS machine and can serve as a counter check of the canvassing tallies (even if we are not sure of the PCOS count itself). The noncer-tification of the public website which would inform us of the results means that we are not sure if it would crash during election day or even if it would report faithfully the results of the tallies.

Even in the parts that Systest has certified, it did so with a caveat. Comelec must institute procedures that will offset the “minor” problems that SysTest encountered. We are not sure that the Comelec has done any corrective measures along the chain of tallying the votes.

Last Monday, we started receiving reports from Makati, Taguig and other places in and out of Manila that tell of problems arising from the testing of the PCOS machine prior to its sealing. Test votes for various candidates were not counted and sometimes their names would not appear on the election return printed out by the machine. The day after the Comelec and Smartmatic recalled the Compact Flash (CF) cards for Metro Manila and halted the Final Testing and Sealing procedures for the rest of the country.

Smartmatic points to a configuration problem supposedly arising from the spacing format that they used in the ballot.

We pointed out in this column, as early as March, possible problems with the CF card and it pains us to be saying “We told you so” at this point. The main problem of Comelec and Smartmatic with the current issue of the CF cards is not the technical issue of the configuration file but the on-time delivery of the cards to the various polling centers and still have time for reasonable testing to be done.

What of the other parts that were not tested—the various servers and the firmware? What of the environmental testing such as the humidity problem that we have encountered in Hong Kong? What about the human element of the whole process—the stamina of our Boards of Election Inspectors particularly its chairmen? These problems are still to be tested but Comelec has swept most of these issues under the rug and claimed compliance with their targets. They indeed delivered the PCOS machine but with defective CF cards. They indeed printed out the ballots on time but with misaligned UV markings. They might be able to pull off an election on May 2010 but what other problems would we expect?

With only a few days to go, our people must not only be good citizens who would vote but also be active participants in monitoring the conduct of the whole elections on Monday and act when necessary. That will be our key to ensure that the end result of this whole exercise will be for the benefit of the majority and not just a few.