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Other poll fraud claims quickly debunked by Comelec, Smartmatic


Other allegations of poll fraud and discrepancies by losing candidates were raised Thursday at the House committee on suffrage and electoral reforms' hearing on the automated elections, but these were quickly debunked by Smartmatic and election officials. San Pablo City vice mayor Frederick Martin Ilagan, who lost his reeelection bid, told the House panel that two people who claimed to be a "brokers" for the Commission on Elections (Comelec) and technology provider Smartmatic — Ed Bumagat, and Manolo Gonzales — offered to rig the elections for him and his local partymates. The two claimed the votes could be rigged by using duplicate Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines to transmit election results three days prior to the elections, or by reconfiguring the compact flash (CF) cards in the machines to favor the vote counts for certain candidates, Ilagan said. "The offer made me think for two days," Ilagan said, adding that the proposal was made during the second week of February. Ilagan told reporters after the hearing that the alleged poll fraud operators asked for P30 million to rig the votes for congressman, mayor, vice mayor and 10 councilors; P15 million for mayor, vice mayor, and 10 councilors; and P8 million for mayor, vice mayor, and five councilors. The defeated vice mayor said he eventually made a "counter-offer" of P500,000 to the operator to "protect" the votes for him. The operators said they would consider the offer but did not contact Ilagan again. He said he didn't raise the matter to authorities immediately because he "just thought of [them] as scam artists or syndicates trying to get money from [his] party" after they failed to contact him again. Ilagan said he was no longer interested in the vice mayoral post, and was there are at the hearing to "shed light" on the poll fraud issue. But Smartmatic election systems manager Heider Garcia promptly replied that the methods cited by the supposed operator were not possible. Encryption keys for the automated system were still being generated in February so the alleged poll operators couldn't possibly know how to manipulate the data, Garcia said. "The PCOS are offline during the entire process," he said, adding that the central server was also protected by a firewall that was not lifted until election day when actual results from precincts were transmitted. "Before that, nothing can come into the central server," said Garcia. He added that even if there were duplicate PCOS machine transmissions, the system could detect if two sets of data were coming in from the same precinct. North Cotabato vice governor Emmanuel Piñol also appeared before the committee to show a video uploaded on Youtube that purportedly showed North Cotabato election results on the Comelec website that were different from the results on election returns. Pinol ran for governor but lost the race to incumbent Cotabato Rep. Lala Talinio-Mendoza. He has filed an electoral protest. But Commission on Information and Communication Technology (CICT) Secretary Ray Anthony Roxas-Chua III, who is also the chairman of the Comelec advisory council, said the website page shown on the video could have been easily falsified by creating a page similar to the Comelec webpages. "That video can be easily replicable, we can do it right now," Roxas-Chua said. Lawmakers, particularly Cagayan de Oro Rep. Rufus Rodriguez, continued to grill the Comelec for the erroneous time stamp on election returns and the contingency measure to send 20 back-up CF cards to provincial election supervisors. But some of the lawmakers' queries have already been answered during previous hearings and the canvassing of votes Tuesday afternoon, said Comelec commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal. Smartmatic Asia President Cesar Flores pointed out that he has been explaining over the past few weeks that the erroneous time stamp on some ERs were likely because the hardware was reset or a warehouse operator made the wrong time adjustment. He said Smartmatic is already doing an inventory of the PCOS machines to determine where the errors took place and who were responsible for them. Larrazabal said the Comelec was already pressed for time because they were attending both the interrogation in the morning hearings and the canvassing of votes for president and vice president in the afternoon. The Comelec commissioner suggested that lawmakers should just send their questions to the Comelec so they could create a Frequently Asked Questions list that they could upload on the poll body's website. Committee chair Makati City Rep. Teodoro "Teddyboy" Locsin Jr. welcomed the idea, which he said was similar to the summary he previously asked Smartmatic to do. He said Tuesday that Smartmatic's report was "accepted" and that he was inclined to clear the firm of poll fraud allegations. Locsin has suspended the hearings until further notice. - RJAB Jr., GMANews.TV

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