MANILA, Philippines - The Philippines wasted P7.2-billion of hard-earned money with an error-ridden automated election system, an IT expert said Thursday.

"We are back to where we were when we were using the manual elections," Augusto Lagman of the anti-election fraud group Transparent Elections.Org told ANC's Headstart, referring to the various complaints about the automated election system.

Lagman maintained that the Commission on Elections (Comelec) should have followed a provision in the Republic Act 9369 or the Automated Elections Law that says the automated system should have been initially tested in pilot areas before it is applied in a national scale.

He said that while it is normal in the IT world for programs to have errors, Smartmatic should have spotted these early and solved them before the May 10 polls.

“I guess there was a problem with the program. A glaring error like that is so easy to stop. When those things happen, it also might happen in other parts of the program,” Lagman said.

Discrepancies, glitches

He was referring to the error in the number of registered voters in the Canvassing and Consolidation System (CCS), which was discovered the night after the May 10 elections.

The CCS showed there were 256 million registered voters for the May 10 polls. Smartmatic explained that an application error made the system multiply the actual number of registered voters of 51.3 million by 5.

Cesar Flores, president of Smartmatic Asia Pacific, said that instead of adding the registered voters per precinct, the application added the registered voters in the precinct, municipal and provincial levels.

Another problem is the discrepancy in time stamps on election returns. Some ERs were dated April 27, raising fears of pre-shaded ballots being fed into voting machines and transmitted to the servers before the actual elections.

There were also complaints of Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines failing to log its activity during election day, including the feeding of ballots.

Several PCOS machines also malfunctioned and replaced with standby machines on election day.

Lagman said such errors should have been spotted earlier by the Smartmatic given the importance of the democratic exercise.

“In a big system like this, our elections! This is not just a payroll system. This is our elections. You have to completely test the system before you apply it,” he said.

Comelec also at fault

Lagman, meanwhile, said that unless supposed witnesses, including alias Robin or “Koala Boy,” show proof that there were player PCOS machines and swapping of flashcards, the allegations would remain unbelievable.

He also believes that if cheating was done in the elections, it could not have come from outside, but within the ranks of poll equipment supplier Smartmatic.

Lagman said Comelec was also partly responsible for the problems in the automated election system.

“It’s not just the Smartmatic, but more Comelec because they are the ones supposed to be administering the elections, Smartmatic is just a vendor,” he said. “Unfortunately, Comelec passed on all the responsibilities of running and managing the elections to Smartmatic. They are now both in trouble.”

Smartmatic and Comelec officials were grilled Wednesday by lawmakers during the hearing of the joint canvassing committee of Congress.

The actual canvassing of votes of president and vice president has yet to start because of questions about the automated election system.

Congress leaders, however, assured that the new president and vice president will be proclaimed before June 30.