YPS

The problem with any process whether IT or manual is that its validity relies not only on old or new technology but whether the implementing agency is trustworthy or not.

For close to a year now the opponents of the automated election systems or AES have been talking about chaos scenarios and how they, as both clean election advocates and IT experts ( and I emphasize their claim to be experts), were 100% sure that the elections would fail. The fail point was not only the technology and the process of implementations but the LOW TRUST FACTOR that they gave the Comelec.

Their solution, and to show their distrust, was to say no to random manual audit ( RMA)and DEMAND a 100% FULL PARALLEL count.

When the full parallel count was denied the IT experts and advocates began to promote doomsday scenarios more vigorously and almost promised that there would be no elections and if it went through at all the results would all be rigged in favor of the perceived candidates of GMA.

What happened on election day changed all that.

When Noy won ( were assuming he will be declared) all of a sudden all the critics were silenced. It wasn’t as if the process had changed or that the Comelec was more trusted. The critics were silenced because it was their candidate that won!

But heres the thing, if they were so sure that the elections would fail and it was rigged, shouldn’t it be that regardless of who wins there should still be suspicion on the validity of the winner?

The validation process went from invalid, due to who is running the elections (Comelec) and how it is being implemented (AES, PCOS, CF cards) , to finally valid because the output was acceptable (Noy winning).

The fact that the elections went as peacefully and as quickly as it did is a credit to the efforts of all the players. From the critics of the system, to the people in Comelec that wanted to see the system work, to the Smartmatic people who did everything they could to make the technology work, to the people on the ground that made it work, and to the voters that trusted the system enough to use the system.

Today there is no more talk of FULL MANUAL COUNT to validate the process.

Nobody is paying attention to the random manual audit to be implemented by the COMELEC.

No one is wondering about what variances in ballot and machine counts define a failed or successfull election.

No one is raising a howl about the RMA results possibly taking a month or more to report that may push the publication of results way into the term of the next president.

No one is asking for a random sampling of the infamous CF cards so that they can be audited on existing PCOS machines to show input versus output.

The sad fact about it is that the IT experts and the advocates really dont seem care about the process anymore.

All they seem to care about is that their candidate won.

So while the technical side of the elections as a whole seems to be a qualified success and should be used and improved on for the next election, if the alleged advocates and IT experts who claimed to seek only truth and justice do not demand a full validating process then they themselves have been proven as failures.