Poll watchdog warns of modern-day 'ballot switching'

Poll watchdog Kontra Daya on Tuesday scored the Commission on Elections (Comelec) for pegging the electronic transmission of election results only at 90 percent, saying this would make the canvassing system vulnerable to cheating.

 

With the electronic transmission rate at 90 percent, roughly 10 percent of the election results are expected to be transmitted manually.

 

Kontra Daya said Comelec should have addressed issues of poor signal and geography because allowing the physical delivery of SD cards "opens up to scenarios of modern-day ballot box snatching."

 

In the 2010 national polls, the transmission rate was also at 90 percent but this went down to 76 percent in the 2013 midterm polls.

 

For the May 9 elections, the transmission of results will be done mostly via SIM cards.

 

Around 85 percent of 92,509 clustered precincts will be adopting this method while 4,500 precincts in areas with poor signals will transmit using broadband global area network satellites.

 

Should transmission fail in a precinct, the secure digital (SD) cards of the vote counting machine must be brought to the city or municipal board of canvassers, where the results will be manually uploaded.

 

The protocol, however, states that SD cards should be brought to the board of canvassers even if transmission of results is successful.

 

Under this scenario, the SD cards will be stolen and replaced to affect the results.

 

"Without the digital signing safety feature in place, the canvassing servers would integrate the results of SD cards brought to it," Kontra Daya convenor Dr. Giovanni Tapang said in a press conference in Quezon City.

 

"Di natin alam dahil walang (digital) signature, di mo alam kung ang ipinadala na numero ay yun pa rin dun (sa original). The signature itself will actually give you a way ma-confirm kung nagbago ba ang resulta o hindi. Pag binago nila ang numero, there is no way for us to question," he added.

 

Asked who would be capable of resorting to SD card switching to undermine the poll results, Tapang said any person or group that has interest in the elections could commit fraud.

 

"The administration has its machinery. The opposition also has its machinery, from local to the national (level). The problem really is that the Comelec made it so easy for them (to cheat)," he said.

 

Poll technology provider Smartmatic, however, had allayed fears of result manipulation by pointing out over the weekend that its SD cards use 256-bit keys encryption, which is said to be twice as strong as the one used in banks.

 

Smartmatic voter education chief Karen Jimeno was earlier quoted in a newspaper report that it will take 50 years to hack the SD card due to the need for more mathematical permutations. Tapang was not convinced.

 

"Actually we don't know because we haven't seen how they actually write the data in the SD card. Despite it being encrypted or not, there can be pre-prepared SD card somewhere already," he said. — VVP, GMA News