Smartmatic lives in the country!

“History has recorded the many elections “conducted” by Smartmatic have been marked by highly insecure and non-transparent voting technology.

Smartmatic, the voting services provider in Philippine elections from the years 2010 to 2019, knows that its reputation, along with its machines, carries a long lasting stench in the Philippines, perhaps not in the Commission on Elections (Comelec) that has embraced the Smartmatic automated services and “technology” despite its history of electoral cheating, but among the Filipino electorate, that has been greeted year after year, with their votes stolen through massive automated fraud.

Perhaps knowing that Smartmatic may not be able to bag the contract for its provision of electoral services this time around, Smartmatic was reported to have recently introduced its “newest voting machine touted by the London-based firm as a breakthrough in voting security and transparency.

Already, Smartmatic Philippine officials were quoted as saying that the new system is “a middle ground between the assured security of traditional paper ballots and the speed and ease of modern, touchscreen voting machines.”

This is the way Smartmatic’s new machines go, making the voting feature simple and easy to understand the way for voters to mark choices on a touch screen.

The report went on to say that the machine prints the choices onto a paper ballot, allowing voters to verify and even correct selections before officially casting their ballots. Really, the machines used in 2019 here also had a list of the votes, but the cheating still went on, especially since the list of voters isn’t given for him to keep and check.

Moreover, Smartmatic added, utmost security is ensured, since the claim is that the voting machines are designed to stand alone, and are not connected to any kind of a network or the Internet.

But pray tell, Comelec commissioners and the usual Comelec cheating syndicate that still has not been extinguished to this day, why would the Comelec and its officials even think of again getting the services of Smartmatic and Comelec, when the service provider has been caught cheating, again and again, all throughout the automated election years in this country?

The Smartmatic Asia Pacific president was said to have vowed to continue providing secure and transparent voting technology to the country as the government looks for alternative providers.

Is this the alternate reality of Smartmatic president, especially when it services the elections in the Philippines? History has recorded the many elections “conducted” by Smartmatic have been marked by highly insecure and non-transparent voting technology. Yet today, Smartmatic is again introducing another non-transparent way of voting?

Smartmatic knows that somehow it will probably get the nod of the Comelec and will again be providing yet more questionable victories in 2022.

This despite Smartmatic’s record of dirty elections in the Philippines over the years and with their machines conking out, while vote count blackouts occur, and millions in votes suddenly appear in the morning, favoring another candidate who earlier in the day lagged behind another candidate yet ended up “winning” the elective seat, thanks to Smartmatic’s magical way of making non-winners win.

It happened in 2010, 2014, 2016, 2019, so why not in 2022, for another Smartmatic-induced miracle victory, especially since a congressional panel, the Joint Congressional Oversight Committee on Automated Election System in its July probe, despite the clear evidence of massive electoral fraud, claimed it found no evidence of fraud and manipulation in the 13 May elections. However, the joint congressional panel said some recommendations have been made to plug vulnerabilities in the country’s polls.

Since that day of the joint congressional probe in May, the same panel has not worked on the claimed “recommendations.” Furthermore, it is not expected that congressmen and even senators who may have benefitted from the automated cheating and are currently seated, may want to keep the cheating ways going, since they have become its beneficiaries.

To this day, despite calls from different sectors as well as the Filipino electorate on the massive fraud attached to the 2016 elections, which marred the vice presidential election, along with the 2019 senatorial elections where those senatorial bets who were not expected to rank too highly, suddenly zoomed in ranking, Congress isn’t moving to ensure clean elections and a clean service provider.

Why isn’t the Congress — both houses — working on crafting a bill calling for, at the very least, hybrid polls to minimize, if not eliminate, automated cheating? There can be a simultaneous count of the manual and the automated vote. Even better than an automated count, a manual precinct count can ensure that the candidates — especially the national candidates, can know where their votes come from, due manually counting the precinct votes.

But there has been no move from the House of Representatives and the Senate to safeguard the electorate’s sovereign vote — and the voter’s sovereign will being thwarted year after election year is not important to them, since some of them today sit in both Houses of Congress, thanks to massive fraud.

Indeed, for some of them, why rock the fraudulent ballot boat that benefits them immensely?