Bishop wants source code in automated polls made public

MANILA, Philippines - A ranking Catholic bishop urged Wednesday the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to disclose the source code of the Optical Mark Reader (OMR) it would use in the 2010 elections. Manila Auxiliary Bishop Broderick Pabillo, an advocate of open election system (OES), asked the poll body to open the source code for public scrutiny. “To ensure the democratic principle of ‘secret voting and public counting,’ ...and for ‘transparent, fair and credible elections,’ we challenge the Comelec to make public the source code for the (Precinct Count Optical Scan-Optical Mark Reader) that will be used in the May 10, 2010 elections," Pabillo said in an article on the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines Web site. By making the source code open, he said, the public coul have access to election results if they wish. Pabillo, who heads the CBCP’s Episcopal Commission on Social Action-Justice and Peace, said their support for an open-source system remains firm. “It has a simple system. The voting would be done manually and that means we do not need that much time, unlike the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) system," he said. He added that since ordinary computers would be used, the OES does not require hardware and there is not much training involved. Various civic groups see OES as combining manual voting and tallying and automated canvassing. Pabillo said that unlike the manual election, the PCOS is more prone to automated election fraud if not enough safeguards would be put in place. He added that it was not specified in the law that there should be no human intervention. Pabillio, together with the conveners and participants to a forum on the 2010 automated polls held recently at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City, push of the OES . The group particularly urged the Comelec to require the bidders for the P11.3 billion PCOS-OMR system to reveal their source code in order to allow Filipino IT specialists and other interested parties to scrutinize it. Both the Comelec and the bidders, forum participants said, must convince the country’s 50 million voters that their source code is not vulnerable to either hacking or rigging, and that their votes will be counted accurately. “We also ask the Comelec to make available to the media and the public copies of the video documentation of the ongoing bidding process for the sake of transparency and scrutiny," Pabillo said. - GMANews.TV