SPECIAL REPORT-AUTOMATED ELECTION-Fourth of a Series- May 7, 2010
SPECIAL REPORT-AUTOMATED ELECTION
Fourth of a Series- May 7, 2010
By Ike Seneres
Three days to go before Election Day, and the COMELEC has not snapped out of their denial stage. They still believe, or they would still want us to believe that they could deploy most of the 80,000 Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines before Monday, complete with the same number of compact flash (CF) cards.
As the controversy over the CF cards is heating up, a new theory has emerged, bringing out a new threat to the democratic voting process that is more vicious than the other threats. Yesterday, I received another call from a concerned citizen who informed me that he has reliable information from a COMELEC insider who could no longer hold back his conscience about a system of cheating that will completely change the outcome of the election, not unless it is exposed and stopped on its track.
Several months back, I wrote an article about twenty possible ways of cheating in the automated system of elections. I wrote that one way is to print invisible marks in the ballot itself, marks that could issue instructions to the PCOS machine, as to what to count and what not to count. What I wrote was technologically sound, because it is doable within the Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) technology.
According to my informant, some operators within the COMELEC have already succeeded in pre-programming the PCOS machines so that it will prioritize the reading (the recognition) of pre-determined invisible marks, instead of the visible optical marks. In technical terms, this has something to do with data protocol, meaning that the optical mark reader will read first (or read only) the invisible marks. In layman terms, what this means is that the machine will count the votes in favor of the pre-determined candidates as chosen by the insider operators, regardless of what the voter will shade.
As a writer and as a columnist, it is not my place to say that there will be cheating in the election. All I could say within my sphere of responsibility, within the reach of my technical know-how is that the system is vulnerable, meaning that cheating could happen if anyone wants to cheat. As far as I know, the old operators are still lurking within the COMELEC, even if the system of voting is already new.
In what appears to be an anti-climactic move, the COMELEC decided to remove several security features that would have protected the sanctity of the ballot as it was originally intended. One of these features is the built-in capability of the PCOS to automatically read ballots that do not have the proprietary ultra violet (UV) marks. This would have screened out fake ballots in the first place.
Citing some unclear reasons, the COMELEC said the PCOS could no longer read the UV marks, so much so that they had to buy separate UV mark readers. The problem with that is that they bought generic UV readers from the open market, and with that they said that Board of Election Inspectors (BEIs) could now accept any ballot that has any UV mark. That is also a problem, because anyone could cheaply buy any UV marker from the open market, which means that anyone now could produce fake ballots.
Several IT experts have already said that the CF cards might have been used to insert (embed) malicious codes such as Trojan Horses into the operating system (O/S) or application software of the PCOS. In the light of this new speculation that malicious instructions might have been pre-printed as invisible marks, it would not be too far fetched to speculate that the issue about the CF cards might have been used as a smokescreen to draw attention away from the invisible marks, in which case we are talking here about the cards in effect becoming the stool pigeons.
With three more days to go before the actual Election Day, it is still not clear whether the COMELEC could really finish the reconfiguration of the cards. Meanwhile, IT expert Mr. Leo Querubin has issued a reminder that the COMELEC had actually promised to finish investigating the secrecy folder issue in two weeks time, but it is already five weeks since they made that promise, and we have not heard from them. Mr. Querubin suspects that the investigation might now be in secrecy.
It is also possible that the hullabaloo over the CF cards might have been used also as a smokescreen to cover up the fact that there are still some unfinished tests in the transmission, canvassing and consolidation systems. With no more time to do any further tests, it seems that the COMELEC will just go ahead and run these systems out of blind faith that somehow, someway, these systems will not fail against all probabilities.
Check out the complete series at www.senseneres.blogspot.com
Fourth of a Series- May 7, 2010
By Ike Seneres
Three days to go before Election Day, and the COMELEC has not snapped out of their denial stage. They still believe, or they would still want us to believe that they could deploy most of the 80,000 Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines before Monday, complete with the same number of compact flash (CF) cards.
As the controversy over the CF cards is heating up, a new theory has emerged, bringing out a new threat to the democratic voting process that is more vicious than the other threats. Yesterday, I received another call from a concerned citizen who informed me that he has reliable information from a COMELEC insider who could no longer hold back his conscience about a system of cheating that will completely change the outcome of the election, not unless it is exposed and stopped on its track.
Several months back, I wrote an article about twenty possible ways of cheating in the automated system of elections. I wrote that one way is to print invisible marks in the ballot itself, marks that could issue instructions to the PCOS machine, as to what to count and what not to count. What I wrote was technologically sound, because it is doable within the Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) technology.
According to my informant, some operators within the COMELEC have already succeeded in pre-programming the PCOS machines so that it will prioritize the reading (the recognition) of pre-determined invisible marks, instead of the visible optical marks. In technical terms, this has something to do with data protocol, meaning that the optical mark reader will read first (or read only) the invisible marks. In layman terms, what this means is that the machine will count the votes in favor of the pre-determined candidates as chosen by the insider operators, regardless of what the voter will shade.
As a writer and as a columnist, it is not my place to say that there will be cheating in the election. All I could say within my sphere of responsibility, within the reach of my technical know-how is that the system is vulnerable, meaning that cheating could happen if anyone wants to cheat. As far as I know, the old operators are still lurking within the COMELEC, even if the system of voting is already new.
In what appears to be an anti-climactic move, the COMELEC decided to remove several security features that would have protected the sanctity of the ballot as it was originally intended. One of these features is the built-in capability of the PCOS to automatically read ballots that do not have the proprietary ultra violet (UV) marks. This would have screened out fake ballots in the first place.
Citing some unclear reasons, the COMELEC said the PCOS could no longer read the UV marks, so much so that they had to buy separate UV mark readers. The problem with that is that they bought generic UV readers from the open market, and with that they said that Board of Election Inspectors (BEIs) could now accept any ballot that has any UV mark. That is also a problem, because anyone could cheaply buy any UV marker from the open market, which means that anyone now could produce fake ballots.
Several IT experts have already said that the CF cards might have been used to insert (embed) malicious codes such as Trojan Horses into the operating system (O/S) or application software of the PCOS. In the light of this new speculation that malicious instructions might have been pre-printed as invisible marks, it would not be too far fetched to speculate that the issue about the CF cards might have been used as a smokescreen to draw attention away from the invisible marks, in which case we are talking here about the cards in effect becoming the stool pigeons.
With three more days to go before the actual Election Day, it is still not clear whether the COMELEC could really finish the reconfiguration of the cards. Meanwhile, IT expert Mr. Leo Querubin has issued a reminder that the COMELEC had actually promised to finish investigating the secrecy folder issue in two weeks time, but it is already five weeks since they made that promise, and we have not heard from them. Mr. Querubin suspects that the investigation might now be in secrecy.
It is also possible that the hullabaloo over the CF cards might have been used also as a smokescreen to cover up the fact that there are still some unfinished tests in the transmission, canvassing and consolidation systems. With no more time to do any further tests, it seems that the COMELEC will just go ahead and run these systems out of blind faith that somehow, someway, these systems will not fail against all probabilities.
Check out the complete series at www.senseneres.blogspot.com
posted by Ike Señeres at 11:45 AM
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