By: Jerome Auza
The Vice Presidential race has become so heated and allegations of cheating are flying all over traditional media and social media. Technical buzzwords suddenly became topics of conversations which added to the confusion. The terms hash, character encoding, digital signature and many more are discussed by people who are not necessarily experts on these matters.
The issues started when Bongbong Marcos initially led the unofficial tally but was quickly overtaken by Leni Robredo. The two candidates now have votes over 13M each but Robredo leads only by a thin margin. Marcos alleged that COMELEC modified the tally. The allegation became somewhat credible because a Smartmatic programmer made a cosmetic change on the software to properly display the enye character which initially showed up as a question mark. To make matters worse, the programmer broke protocol because he did not get an approval from the COMELEC before making the change.
Fortunately for the Filipino people, COMELEC did the right process in conducting the random manual audit (RMA). In a previous post, I expressed my worry that the RMA could be manipulated because the initial reports was that the precincts to be audited are to be selected before the elections. However, in the 2016 elections, the actual precincts for audit were selected on May 10 or after the election results were transmitted to the servers. This means any form of cheating at the vote counting machine (VCM) level can be detected.
Any modification of tally results can be verified from any of the three independent servers that the VCMs connected to and submitted the results. One server is used by the COMELEC for its unofficial and official tally. Another one is used by PPCRV and the other by NAMFREL. The independent nature of PPCRV and NAMFREL is intended to ensure that the COMELEC tally can be verified.
In other words, cheating by simply manipulating the tally simply wouldn’t work because that can be detected by looking at the NAMFREL and PPCRV tallies. Cheating by preprogramming results at the VCM level can be detected by the RMA. The combination of the RMA and the independent tallies by PPCRV and NAMFREL makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to manipulate the results.
I think it is irresponsible for people to allege that cheating has occurred simply because initially Marcos led the tally but later on Robredo took the lead. That situation was easily explained by the fact that the areas that favored Marcos where the ones that were able to send their results first. The areas that favored Robredo sent their results at a later time.
Those making the allegations must be able to show that COMELEC, NAMFREL and PPCRV tallies are significantly different. Then they should show that the precints were the alleged cheating has happened have a mismatch of data from the three servers.
We wish for certainty of the VP results by this time, but unfortunately the results are still too close to call. We probably just have to wait until all the ballots are officially tallied by COMELEC and certified by NAMFREL and PPCRV to be the same as that on their own servers.
