Batas Mauricio .
IT is indeed good that an honest-to-goodness investigation on cheating during elections using computers or PCOS (or Precinct Count Optical Scan) machines is going to be conducted in the Senate, in the wake of an expose made on Tuesday by Sen. Vicente Sotto III.
Even before this, many have already been saying (including us in this column) that cheating on an epic scale in elections where PCOS machines or computers were used had been going on virtually unmolested ever since computerized voting was introduced in the Philippines, but, wonder of wonders, nobody but nobody, from the Commission on Elections and from Malacanang, acted in any way to look into this curse.
The truth cannot also be denied: in my capacity as the lawyer of several citizens, I filed a petition with the Comelec right after the conclusion of the 2013 computerized elections. I detailed before the Comelec the anomalies which the people detected and then established from the voting in their locality, where PCOS machines were used.
And so the public may know, here are some parts of that petition I filed against the 2013 computerized elections: “Legally, Petitioners, as residents and registered voters of … City, are entitled to know who among the four mayoralty candidates in their city… really won as their mayor during the May 13, 2013 elections…
“Based on what they personally witnessed, experienced, came to know of, and discerned on election day, it is clear to the Petitioners herein that while … got proclaimed as the duly-elected mayor of … City, that proclamation was null and void, as there was a failure of election in the city…
“Why are Petitioners saying that there was a failure of elections in … City during the May 13, 2013 elections? The first reason is that, the results that led to the proclamation of the Respondent… as mayor-elect were statistically and mathematically improbable, and appeared to have been the product of massive electronic and automated fraud arising from glaring, blatant and deliberate violations of Republic Act 8792, which is otherwise known as the Electronic Commerce Act of 2000…
The petition went on to explain: “… an examination of the official statement of votes which (Petitioners) gathered initially from 300 precincts in the city showed that the electronic data reflected in those statement of votes and produced by the PCOS machines in those precincts did not match with one another…
“To show this in more concrete form: In Clustered Precincts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 46, 47, 48 and 49 under District 1 of Pasay City, the total number of ballots that were allegedly counted by the PCOS machines… amounted to only 7,547, but, the total number of all votes credited to all the four mayoralty candidates totaled a whooping 9,045…
“Clearly, there was here an inexplicable, and therefore, greatly fraudulent, mismatch of electronic data… which showed an excess of 1,858 votes that the PCOS machines supposedly counted…
“The same massive mismatch and incapacity of being authenticated of electronic data are also manifested in Clustered Precincts 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, and 56, and (in Clustered Precincts 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, and 150)…”
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