Election Mathematics

News Update: Nueva Ecija faced with questions over PCOS machines
Posted on May 15, 2010 by class95cafe, Roberto Verzola

GUIMBA, Nueva Ecija – The entire automated election system, hailed as successful on a national scale, is now put to question by the massive failure of precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines to faithfully transmit results of Monday’s elections in Nueva Ecija which has an electorate of more than a million.

Over the last four days beginning Election Day, May 10, the Provincial Board of Canvassers has been saddled with technical problems with as many as 100 of the 103 PCOS machines used in the polls failing to transmit results from Nueva Ecija’s 26 towns and five cities. Provincial Election Supervisor Fernando Cot-om admitted last Wednesday that only the town of Nampicuan, which has three PCOS machines, managed to digitally transmit election returns. Cot-om said defective compact flash cards caused the problem but that Comelec officials already replaced them with new ones from the Smartmatic warehouse in Cabuyao, Laguna. In a statement released on the same day, Guimba Election Officer Manuel Tambalque said the solution has only allowed 46 clustered precincts to transmit results to the Comelec.

The Comelec official explained earlier that of the 103 PCOS machines used, 26 failed to transmit; 17 failed to count; 17 are defective; and 15 malfunction. Meanwhile, reports surfaced in the middle of the long wait that some PCOS machines had changed hands from the Board of Election Inspectors – others found in the custody of barangay captains supposedly for safekeeping.

Guimba Vice Mayor Ler de Guzman said that out of 15 PCOS machines already surrendered by BEIs to the municipal hall, 10 were missing by noon Thursday. Other unconfirmed reports from poll watchers mention of flash cards being destroyed.

The Provincial Board of Canvassers declared on Thursday night the transmittal of nearly 80 percent of the election returns in the province’s four legislative districts. Former Presidential Assistant for North Luzon Rene Diaz, a candidate for representative of the 1st District of Nueva Ecija, is set to challenge the integrity of the results of the canvassing, following the apparent failure of the automated system of transmitting results of the polls.

Diaz wants the Comelec and Smartmatic investigate the suspicious failure of PCOS machines to transmit results. “Ultimately, if there is doubt in the what transpired in between the supposed failure of the PCOS machines to transmit (results) and the canvassing that’s going on right now in the provincial level, then it’s not just the results of the governors or congressmen in Nueva Ecija that may be put into question, but results of all other national positions as well such as for vice president, senators or party-lists,” Diaz pointed out.

The province of Nueva Ecija has an electorate of over 1 million, Diaz said, with his district having over 324,000 registered voters. Since Election Day, tension has gripped as the provincial canvassing board held off any proclamation of winners due to the massive failure of the PCOS machines. “Who is responsible? That is the question that has to be answered here and how can we ensure the integrity of the results?” Diaz said. “Smartmatic, the company that created and supplied the automated voting system used in the May 10 polls, should get to the bottom of the problem and expose irregularities in their operation, if any,” he said.

HALALANG MARANGAL PRESS STATEMENT (May 14, 2010)

Why is the random audit taking too long?

Halalang Marangal (HALAL) is alarmed that the random manual audit is taking too long, and that results in those precincts where the audit is finished are not being made public immediately. A precinct audit should only take at most half a day, after which its results should be immediately transmitted to the audit committee and simultaneously made public. Any delay will fuel fears about discrepancies being covered up and will make the audit process less credible.

The random manual audit is the only remaining chance we have to determine the error rate of the PCOS machines that counted our votes on May 10. Without knowing the error rate, we do not know how trustworthy the machine counts and, by extension, the election outcomes are.

Our four other chances to determine the machines’ error rate have been taken away from us:

1.)The results of Comelec acceptance tests, which should have included tests for machine error rates, remain confidential.

2.)The Systest Labs test results, which should also include machine error rates, also remain confidential.

3.)Three days before election day, a final testing should have established that the machines make zero error when counting the votes in ten ballots. Instead, the machines showed errors so glaring that the Comelec cancelled the tests. In the confusion and mad rush to reconfigure the machines in time for May 10, we are not sure if every machine passed the ten-ballot test.

4.)On election day, a voter verification feature in the machine should have shown the voter if his choices were correctly registered, but the Comelec disabled this feature.

Thus the May 10 elections were held using PCOS machines whose error rates have not been made public. Today, we still have no idea of the error rates of these machines.

Yet, the Comelec has been prematurely proclaiming winners based on the results issued by these unaudited machines, without waiting for the audit findings. We are only a few days past the May 10 elections and the terms of office of outgoing officials end on June 30 yet. Why the rush?

Instead of enhancing its credibility, the audit committee has been undermining it by:

1) announcing the precincts to be audited at noon time of election day, forewarning cheats who could then immediately order their field operators to stay away from these precincts;

2) taking a long time to finish the audit, devaluing the audit for each day of delay, because cheats get an increasing chance to influence the audit results; and

3) not immediately making public the results from finished precinct audits.

The longer the committee takes to make the results public, the greater the public fear will be of a cover up.

HALAL urges the audit committee to make public audit results as soon as these become available and to finish the audit as soon as possible. HALAL also urges the Comelec not to rush the proclamation of machine winners until the audit and the issues arising from the discrepancies it finds have been fully resolved.

Reference: Roberto Verzola, Secretary-general, HALAL (Tel. 0929-856-1930)

By Roberto Verzola

The May 10 vote count reached millions within a few hours, and was 90% complete within a week. That’s supposed to be impressive. Stunning, even.

But everytime I ask, “so, how accurate are the counting machines?” I get a blank stare, including a surprising “I don’t know” from Mr. Gene Gregorio, Smartmatic spokesman. He gave this answer before journalists at the May 8 Kapihan sa Sulo forum, two days before the elections.

I had also asked Commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal on April 30, when he met a team of IT experts convened by candidate Joey de Venecia III. His reply was also “I don’t know”.

Nobody, it seems, knows. Not the political parties, not PPCRV and other election watchdogs, not the media.

So, we spent around P11 billion and held a nationwide electoral exercise to determine the future of our nation, without knowing if the machines that counted the votes are accurate or not.

By the way, once we know the accuracy, we can get the error rate. A machine that is 95% accurate has an error rate of 5%. One that is 99% accurate has an error rate of 1%. Comelec specifications called for 99.995% accuracy. This means an error rate of .005% or lower no more than one error in 20,000 marks.

We need such low error rates for very close contests. An accuracy of 99.9% (0.1% error rate) may seem good enough. But such machines cannot resolve contests where the apparent winning margin is less than 0.1%. That margin may be simply due to machine error. In 2007, for example, Zubiri supposedly got .07% more votes than Pimentel, which won Zubiri the 12th and last slot for senators. Machines with 0.1% error rates or higher would have been useless for resolving this contest.

The real test of the 2010 automated election is the very close contests, many of which are still unresolved. For such contests, we need low error rates.

We had six chances to know the PCOS error rates. In five, the Comelec either kept the results from us or otherwise undermined our chance to know. In one, we got a really good idea of the PCOS error rates. Let us go through each of the six, one by one:

1. SysTest Labs system audit and source code review (half a year before the elections). We paid SysTest some P72 million (1% of total project cost) to conduct a system audit and source code review of the system. One of the things they should have measured was the error rate of several representative machines. When the Comelec released part of the Systest reports on May 1, I immediately looked for the machine error rate. I didn’t find it. Either SysTest did not measure it – a major omission – or the Comelec kept the results confidential.

2. Comelec acceptance tests (several months before the elections). As PCOS machines came in, the Comelec should have tested these for error rates, among other things. This is simple due diligence before accepting an expensive delivery from a vendor. Any machine with an error rate higher than .005% should have been returned to Smartmatic for calibration or replacement. Accepted machines should have the test results attached to them, accessible to any inspector or stakeholder. The Comelec, if it did these tests at all, have kept the results confidential.

3. Final testing and sealing (FTS) (three days before election day). In some areas, the FTS was done earlier and to everyone’s dismay, the machines made grievous errors! The results were so bad that the Comelec hastily ordered all election inspectors to stop further testing of the machines. For once, we had a good idea of the machines’ accuracy, or lack of it.

4. Second FTS. That fiasco triggered a last-minute mad rush to recall, import, reconfigure, redistribute and reinstall new memory cards in time for May 10. In the chaos, security and chain of custody procedures must have been ignored or bypassed. Were all new memory cards properly configured? Were all properly delivered and installed? Were all machines properly tested? Did all machines pass the test? I’ve heard this story several times: “We were told that the testing will be done Sunday afternoon; when we went Sunday, they told us it was done Saturday.” Thus, when we held the elections, we did not know which machines were accurate, and which have remained grossly inaccurate, as we saw in the first FTS.

5. Voter verification of correct scanning of voters’ choices (on election day). This feature, which is built into the machine and is required by law, would have displayed on the screen the names
of candidates corresponding to the ovals which the voter marked, a confirmation that the machine accurately registered the voter’s choices. This feature was disabled by the Comelec. Thus,
if the machine was registering candidates other than their choices, the voters would never know.

6. Random manual audit (after the elections). Unfortunately, this audit has lost credibility. First, they announced the precincts to be audited noontime of election day. Forewarned which machines would be audited, the cheats would have ordered their field operators to stay away from these precincts. A normal audit should finish in half a day — one day at most. Yet, three days after the elections, no results had been announced. Subsequent results that came in were not made public. The Comelec simply made general public statements that “no discrepancies were found”. Results were delayed a few days, they explained, because ballot boxes were already sent to the municipal treasurer’s office where they had to be retrieved. That’s enough time and opportunity to substitute ballot boxes.

Despite these, the Comelec and local election authorities have already proclaimed winners. They did not even await the random audit results, as if they already knew that the audit would simply confirm the results.

The public is being told, it seems: “We’ve already pulled off a fast count, now you want us to be accurate too?”

{Roberto Verzola has a background in engineering and economics and a passion for social and environmental issues. He is recognized by the IT industry as an Internet pioneer in the Philippines and works with NGOs on technical issues. He is currently a lecturer at the Institute of Mathematics of the University of the Philippines and a convenor of Halalang Marangal (HALAL).

Another article on the Philippine election:
Philippines election: Doubts arise over electronic voting machines
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2010/0309/Philippines-election-Doubts-arise-over-electronic-voting-machines