Petitioner vs Smartmatic not after ballot boxes
By Jomel R. Paguian
OPENING ballot boxes is unnecessary in investigating alleged irregularities in the 2022 national election, said National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL) former chairman Augusto C. Lagman, who filed a petition against automated election systems provider Smartmatic.
“We don’t need to open the ballot box. Our only question is why it (election returns) passed through a private IP (internet protocol) address before reaching the transparency server,” Mr. Lagman said in Filipino when interviewed.
The remark was made in response to Commission on Elections (Comelec) Chairman George Erwin M. Garcia who said in a Viber message last week that petitioners against Smartmatic can choose ballot boxes to open for a manual recount.
Smartmatic said in an e-mail that the use of a private IP address for transmission of votes “is not a violation of any rule of law.”
“It speaks volumes of Comelec’s unflagging commitment to modernization. What matters once again is that all the votes that had been counted, transmitted and canvassed were 100% accurate and not tampered with,” said Smartmatic.
Mr. Lagman, who is also a former Comelec commissioner, insisted that using a private IP address is illegal as it was not mentioned in the law, citing that election results should only be transmitted from precincts to municipal, provincial, and national servers.
“If you put up an IP address, that is not in the law and that should be prohibited,” said Mr. Lagman who claimed that going through a private IP address may give way for a “man-in-the-middle” to alter election results being transmitted to servers.
“We don’t know if the IP address transmits the correct data. It may be manipulated,” he added.
Mr. Lagman said Smartmatic should be banned from bidding for the 2025 national midterm elections given the alleged irregularities. “They (Smartmatic) should be banned. There was a man-in-the-middle in their systems,” he added.
Smartmatic said this claim is disinformation. “The petitioners’ obvious objective is to propagate disinformation,” said Smartmatic. “[T]here is no discrepancy between the precinct-level count and the data as received at the National Board of Canvassers and the Transparency Server.”
Smartmatic added that the petitioners are yet to prove a single-vote discrepancy in the transmitted results as against the precinct results.
Together with Mr. Lagman, former information and communications technology chief Eliseo M. Rio, Jr., Franklin Ysaac, and Leonardo O. Odoño filed the petition to ban Smartmatic on June 16.
Meanwhile, Mr. Rio’s group September Twenty One Reform Movement reiterated their call to ban Smartmatic in a news briefing on Thursday.
