SPECIAL REPORT-AUTOMATED ELECTION Second of a Series- May 5, 2010
SPECIAL REPORT-AUTOMATED ELECTION
Second of a Series- May 5, 2010
By Ike Seneres
In the computer industry, the name and person of the Project Manager (PM) on record is very crucial to the evaluation of his peers whether the project in question will succeed or not. This is similar to the importance of the name and person of a Chef in a fine dining restaurant, which is also the subject of the evaluation of his peers on one hand, and of food critics on the other hand.
Since the time that the COMELEC automation project started, I have been asking two questions that up to now have not been answered by anyone from their end. My first question is who is the PM? My second question is where is their data center? It would follow of course that the data center should also have a manager who is presumably working under the supervision of the PM.
Yesterday, I met with Mr. Ernie Del Rosario, an IT expert who started his career in the private sector, but at one time in his career became the IT Director of the COMELEC. Based on his credentials, Mr. Del Rosario would have been qualified to function as a PM, but he choose to resign from the COMELEC when he finally decided that he could no longer swallow the wrongdoings that he was seeing inside the Commission. He too, could not answer my two questions, and as a result, he wondered about the answers.
I have not seen Del Rosario for a long time, but we saw each other again when we were both interviewed by Mr. Anthony Taberna of ABS-CBN on the subject of the failed Precinct Count Optical Scanning (PCOS) machine testing and sealing procedure. To my surprise, we shared exactly the same position that the COMELEC should decide right away to already put aside optical counting, so that it could save the election and perhaps save the country as well from chaos and public disorder.
Yesterday, the COMELEC announced that they are going to recall the 80,000 or so compact flash (CF) cards that were supposed to be installed in the PCOS machines. These are the same memory cards that caused the malfunction of the said machines. Later in the day, it became clear that the COMELEC only has about 30,000 of these CF cards on stock, and the remaining 50,000 or so are still being procured.
Based on media reports, it took SMARTMATIC about two and a half months to configure the 30,000 CF cards that they had on hand, the same cards that were found to be defective. The COMELEC said that it will only take them three days to reconfigure (reprogram) the CF cards, without explaining how a process that almost took three months could be done in three days. Not surprisingly, the COMELEC was silent on how long it will take them to configure (program) the remaining 50,000 CF cards if and when they could procure these.
As a result of the failed testing and sealing process, the COMELEC ordered the suspension of the delivery of the PCOS machines to most of the provinces, a move that has presented a scary scenario because as it is now, they apparently do not have enough time to deliver these, along with the reconfigured or configured CF cards as the case may be.
In my interview with Mr. Taberna, I called upon the COMELEC to snap out of their state of denial, and for them to admit today or tomorrow that they could no longer meet the deadline for the delivery of the PCOS machines, so that they could already start preparing for manual counting. Mr. Del Rosario did the same thing, calling upon the COMELEC to “bite the bullet” and to face the truth, so that practical moves could already be made.
As I see it now, the lack of a PM on record could be the cause of their operational and technical problems. As the COMELEC admitted that there were indeed programming errors in the configuration of the CF cards, some IT experts wondered what other mistakes they could have made, or are yet to make, considering the apparent lack of both process control and quality control systems.
In a message sent to me, IT expert Mr. Leo Quirubin expressed some serious concerns about the “chain of custody” over the CF cards as these will be moved from the COMELEC warehouse to the precinct level. His concerns are valid, because the high possibility that these cards could be substituted or reprogrammed along the way by malicious persons. In the testing done the other day, there were strong indications that the errors in the optical counting might have been caused by malicious codes that were pre-programmed into the memory cards to favor certain candidates. Mr. Qurubin says that with an unclear “chain of custody”, these cards could be tampered along the way.
Copyright © 2010, publication by newspapers is authorized.
Second of a Series- May 5, 2010
By Ike Seneres
In the computer industry, the name and person of the Project Manager (PM) on record is very crucial to the evaluation of his peers whether the project in question will succeed or not. This is similar to the importance of the name and person of a Chef in a fine dining restaurant, which is also the subject of the evaluation of his peers on one hand, and of food critics on the other hand.
Since the time that the COMELEC automation project started, I have been asking two questions that up to now have not been answered by anyone from their end. My first question is who is the PM? My second question is where is their data center? It would follow of course that the data center should also have a manager who is presumably working under the supervision of the PM.
Yesterday, I met with Mr. Ernie Del Rosario, an IT expert who started his career in the private sector, but at one time in his career became the IT Director of the COMELEC. Based on his credentials, Mr. Del Rosario would have been qualified to function as a PM, but he choose to resign from the COMELEC when he finally decided that he could no longer swallow the wrongdoings that he was seeing inside the Commission. He too, could not answer my two questions, and as a result, he wondered about the answers.
I have not seen Del Rosario for a long time, but we saw each other again when we were both interviewed by Mr. Anthony Taberna of ABS-CBN on the subject of the failed Precinct Count Optical Scanning (PCOS) machine testing and sealing procedure. To my surprise, we shared exactly the same position that the COMELEC should decide right away to already put aside optical counting, so that it could save the election and perhaps save the country as well from chaos and public disorder.
Yesterday, the COMELEC announced that they are going to recall the 80,000 or so compact flash (CF) cards that were supposed to be installed in the PCOS machines. These are the same memory cards that caused the malfunction of the said machines. Later in the day, it became clear that the COMELEC only has about 30,000 of these CF cards on stock, and the remaining 50,000 or so are still being procured.
Based on media reports, it took SMARTMATIC about two and a half months to configure the 30,000 CF cards that they had on hand, the same cards that were found to be defective. The COMELEC said that it will only take them three days to reconfigure (reprogram) the CF cards, without explaining how a process that almost took three months could be done in three days. Not surprisingly, the COMELEC was silent on how long it will take them to configure (program) the remaining 50,000 CF cards if and when they could procure these.
As a result of the failed testing and sealing process, the COMELEC ordered the suspension of the delivery of the PCOS machines to most of the provinces, a move that has presented a scary scenario because as it is now, they apparently do not have enough time to deliver these, along with the reconfigured or configured CF cards as the case may be.
In my interview with Mr. Taberna, I called upon the COMELEC to snap out of their state of denial, and for them to admit today or tomorrow that they could no longer meet the deadline for the delivery of the PCOS machines, so that they could already start preparing for manual counting. Mr. Del Rosario did the same thing, calling upon the COMELEC to “bite the bullet” and to face the truth, so that practical moves could already be made.
As I see it now, the lack of a PM on record could be the cause of their operational and technical problems. As the COMELEC admitted that there were indeed programming errors in the configuration of the CF cards, some IT experts wondered what other mistakes they could have made, or are yet to make, considering the apparent lack of both process control and quality control systems.
In a message sent to me, IT expert Mr. Leo Quirubin expressed some serious concerns about the “chain of custody” over the CF cards as these will be moved from the COMELEC warehouse to the precinct level. His concerns are valid, because the high possibility that these cards could be substituted or reprogrammed along the way by malicious persons. In the testing done the other day, there were strong indications that the errors in the optical counting might have been caused by malicious codes that were pre-programmed into the memory cards to favor certain candidates. Mr. Qurubin says that with an unclear “chain of custody”, these cards could be tampered along the way.
Copyright © 2010, publication by newspapers is authorized.
posted by Ike Señeres at 7:04 AM
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