House panel ends hearing on poll fraud

After nearly three weeks of hearings, the House panel on suffrage and electoral reforms on Tuesday ended its inquiry into alleged poll fraud in the May polls with its chairman Makati Rep. Teodoro "Teddy" Locsin Jr. convinced that the automated election system is "susceptible" to cheating. Locsin said he could not rule out the possibility of cheating in the last elections, after technology provider Smartmatic said ballots could be rescanned and the data stored in the same compact flash (CF) cards. Votes can be manipulated in favor of a certain candidate with the Board of Election Inspectors (BEIs), Locsin said. Favored candidates can have their ballots counted while those belonging to his/her rival can be ignored, he explained. "Apparently if you have control of the precinct, you can do it," said Locsin in an interview with reporters after the hearing. But while he maintained that the system is "susceptible to cheating," Locsin also said Smartmatic and the Commission on Elections (Comelec) have shown over the course of the inquiry that cheating would always leave a trace in the system. Locsin said the committee would release its report before the inauguration of the new president on June 30 after reviewing the transcript of hearings and specific complaints. "We will ignore general statements of nightmare scenarios, we will ignore testimonies of marsupials and then from there we can come to a conclusion," said Locsin, apparently referring to the alleged "whistleblower" of massive poll fraud that he nicknamed "koala bear" or "koala boy" because the mask the whistleblower wore made him look like the animal. Locsin said, "Koala Boy did nothing but give us an appreciation of the evolutionary possibilities of animals." While cheating in the last elections was not categorically proven, Locsin said "the first euphoria over it has been tempered somewhat." But Smartmatic Asia President Cesar Flores said he was convinced that Smartmatic was able to explain convincingly how the system works and why cheating as alleged by some losing candidates were not possible. "I think what happens here, these group of people who did not believe in the results came to this committee with a series of questions and theories and I think fortunately we were able to show through evidence, through science, through the technology that these allegations were not possible or not true," Flores said in an interview with reporters after the hearing. "We guarantee the Filipino people that all the ballots fed into the PCOS machines were counted correctly and therefore everything was canvassed correctly," he added. Flores said he was still of the belief that the May elections was the "cleanest" in the country's history, although he said "there would always be room for improvement." Smartmatic is already doing an inventory of all the PCOS machines used in the last elections. Comelec executive director Jose Tolentino also said the Comelec en banc is discussing the possibility of doing a comprehensive post-mortem of the last elections. For her part, Quezon City Rep. and losing mayoralty candidate Mary Ann Susano, who claimed earlier that she has two CF cards proving that there was poll fraud, said she was going to turn over the CF cards to Locsin. "I trust you but I don't trust them," Susano told Locsin. After Locsin said he does not know what to do with the CF cards, Susano answered: "Keep it as a souvenir of history." - LBG, RJAB Jr., GMANews.TV