The Philippine Online Chronicles

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Granting an election watchdog’s petition, the Supreme Court ordered the Commission on Elections (COMELEC) to disclose the source code of last election’s automated system.

The source code is the readable input of computer programs. According to Republic Act No. 9369 or the Election Automation Law, the source code used by the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines used last May 10 for the national elections should be open for review to any political party or group.

This was, however, not accorded to the Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CENPEG) whose petition was granted by the Court en banc’s seven-page decision ordering COMELEC to follow the law.

The SC pointed out COMELEC’s inability to meet its own source code review deadline as well as the unfortunate reality that the source code is already moot since the elections was four months ago.

What transpired

• April 2009 – COMELEC welcomed Filipino IT groups’ concerns regarding the source code. Spokesperson James Jimenez noted that under RA 9369, source code review is mandatory and invited interested groups to coordinate with the body.
• June 2009 – COMELEC granted CENPEG’s request for a copy of the course code. COMELEC later withdrew its statement saying the source code involved was not the one that will be used for the voters but the one used to process the list of voters.
• August 2009 – COMELEC said it told CENPEG that the source code will only be completed November 2009 at the latest.
• The COMELEC then said that the source code is set for review by an international entity in February 2010. After then, the source code would be open for the group’s review.
• February 2010 – COMELEC announced and manifested in court that the source code had already been deposited to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas for safekeeping.

Automated glitches

A recent column by Gus Lagman criticized COMELEC’s decisions to choose foreign groups – from the hardware and software to the implementation. Like the SC, he pointed out COMELEC’s violation of RA 9369.

“The source code of the Automated Election System (AES) technology should have been made available for review by Filipino IT (Information Technology) professionals (who were going to review the code free of charge),” he said.

He narrated how a P70-million contract was awarded to American company Systest Labs with COMELEC forbidding Filipino ITs from reviewing the code until Systest finished with it.

Lagman added, “To add insult to injury, while Comelec made all the necessary documents available to Systest for their intensive review in their US offices, it would only make the documents available to the locals under a controlled environment.”

Just days before the May 10, 2010 elections, there were reports of testing glitches. Besides hardware problems and brownouts, some PCOS tests allegedly came out with wrong tallies – with some ballots uncounted and votes tallied for wrong candidates.