scale fraud and voter disenfranchisement were raised Friday following the decision by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to downgrade some of the security features of the May 10 automated elections. The National Citizens Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel), an independent citizen watchdog organization, said the downgrading of the security features would put at risk the integrity of the ballot since it would allow cheating to take place. Namfrel's Damaso Magbual cited two actions taken by the Comelec which, he said, make it easier for fraudsters to make a mockery of the election. He noted that the Comelec allowed the disabling of the built-in capability of the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines to read and verify the ultra-violet (UV) security mark on the ballot. The UV-mark is like the UV-mark found in paper money. It is supposed to help the machine detect if the ballots fed to the PCOSmachines are genuine or fake. Magbual said the Comelec also downgraded Voter Verifiable Audit Trail, which would confirm if the votes have been correctly counted by the machines. He said this safety feature is similar to the receipt one gets from transactions in Automated Teller Machines. Replacing this is a congratulatory notice to the voter flashed on the computer screen saying his votes have been read by the PCOS machine. Magbual said the Comelec downgraded the security features on the ground that these would slow down the voting process. “They want speed. They believe those features will delay the voting process,” he said. This leaves just one mechanism to attest the integrity of the voting process, which is the random audit of results to be done by the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV), the accredited election watchdog, Magbual said. However, the PPCRV said it will only perform the random audit after the elections. This may not be enough, Magbual said.Namfrel earlier petitioned the Comelec for accreditation so that it could conduct the manual random of audit to check on the integrity of the machines. The audit is meant to find out if the machines are not manipulated to favor particular candidates. Under the automation law, the random audit is to be conducted in one precinct in every district. Namfrel wanted to expand the random audit to five to 10 precincts per district. The Comelec, however, junked Namfrel's petition for accreditation. In an earlier interview, Commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal, who chairs the steering committee on automation, admitted that the poll body approved the disabling of the UV-mark reader, one of the security features of the PCOS machines. He said he actually did not know the reason that prompted Smartmatic-TIM, the team responsible for the technical aspect of the May 10 elections, to switch off the UV mark scanner in the PCOS machines. As a replacement for the UV-mark reader, he said the Board of Election Inspectors (BEIs) will be provided with UV flashlights that could identify the UV codes. Voters who have doubt on the ballots provided them could ask the BEIs to aim the UV flashlight toward the ballots and locate the UV marks, he said.
