TO PREVENT ELECTION FRAUD

Imee Marcos urges DICT to ensure digital signatures ready for Eleksyon 2022

Senator Imee Marcos on Tuesday urged the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) to ensure that digital signatures of election officers are ready for the upcoming 2022 national and local elections to prevent electoral fraud.

In a statement, Marcos, chair of Senate committee on electoral reforms and public participation, said there is no reason for DICT to delay the registration of teachers who will be issued with personal digital signatures. These digital signature will be used in the upcoming polls.

Her statement came as she noted that DICT’s hard-copy requirements in teachers were delaying the registration for personal digital signatures.

“Do machines have free will? I trust our teachers far more than Smartmatic machines,” Marcos said.

The Department of Education has already proposed faster bulk processing of teachers’ verified personal data by allowing the online submission of Excel of Corel binary script (CSR) files, Marcos said.

“The joke's on us—June is our national ICT month, but there’s still little to celebrate. I think the most practical shortcut will be to piggyback on DepEd’s tried and tested system of registering and monitoring over 900,000 teachers and employees,” the senator said.

She further emphasized that using DepEd’s system will help the DICT to accomplish the registration for personal digital signatures by July, instead of the September 2021 to January 2022 schedule.

Marcos said only machine digital signatures were used since the 2010 automated elections. This, despite the Omnibus Election Code’s provision which states that teachers serving on the board of election inspectors should verify and sign the election returns.

In May, Commission on Elections (Comelec) commissioner Marlon Casquejo said the poll body will impose two new vote transmission measures to ensure transparency in the 2022 national and local elections.

One of these measures is the use of digital signatures of the members of the electoral boards in the process of vote transmission.

“This is to make sure that what was being transmitted from the [Vote Counting Machines] from the voting center, ito ‘yung election returns that will be transmitted to the canvassing center,” he explained.

The Comelec official said the DICT already has the resources for the implementation of digital signatures.

Apart from this, Casquejo said the poll body has decided to provide the receipts right after the voters have inserted their ballots in the vote counting machines.

The Comelec is preparing adjustments in the upcoming 2022 polls due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This, as the poll body remained firm that there is no reason to postpone the upcoming elections.—AOL, GMA News