Breaking News! Ateneo IT Expert Mr. Pablo Manalastas posted on Facebook regardless on an alleged anomaly in the final testing of the VCM (Voting Counting Machine) when you voted for Duterte but your vote was claimed by Mar Roxas.
Here’s the explanation of Mr. Pablo Manalastas below;
You voted for Duterte by shading his oval on your ballot, but the receipt that the Vote Counting Machine (VCM) printed says that you voted for Roxas. This post will explain that if you encounter this error on Election Day, then this error is not your fault. It will show that the error is due to mismatch between the ballot and the VCM configuration file delivered to your precinct, and that Comelec is to blame for this error.
A close examination of the ballot shows that there are 24 column marks numbered column-1 to column-24. Note that column-1, column-7, column-13, and column-19 are the columns where the ovals of the candidates can be found. Also there are 55 row marks, numbered row-1 to row-55. Note that row-11 and row-12 are the rows of the presidential candidates.
When you shade the oval on row-11 column 7 to vote for Duterte, the VCM does not know that you are voting for Duterte since it cannot read Duterte’s name on the ballot, since it is not an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) VCM. It cannot read the characters in the name of your candidates. Instead it can recognize the mark that you put in the oval on row-11 column-7, since it is an Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) VCM. It only knows that you selected the candidate on row-11 column-7. How then does it assign your vote mark to Duterte? It consults a table in the SD card of the VCM that says that Binay is in row-11 column-1, Defensor Santiago is in row-12 column-1, Duterte is in row-11 column-7, Poe is in row-12 column-7, and Roxas is in row-11 column-13. The table is an XML file called “election.xml”, and it is written onto the SD card of the VCM that is delivered to your precinct before Election Day. The election.xml file contains a portion that looks like this.
<contest no=”1″ name=”president”>
<cand row=”11″ column=”1″ no=”1″ name=”Binay”></cand>
<cand row=”12″ column=”1″ no=”2″ name=”Defensor Santiago”></cand>
<cand row=”11″ column=”7″ no=”3″ name=”Duterte”></cand>
<cand row=”12″ column=”7″ no=”4″ name=”Poe”></cand>
<cand row=”11″ column=”13″ no=”5″ name=”Roxas”></cand>
</contest>
This is the correct version of the “election.xml” file for your precinct. So that if you shaded the oval at row=”11″ column=”7″ your vote should go to Duterte, and your receipt should say that you voted for Duterte.
However, the Comelec has to prepare 92,500+ VCM computers and 92,500+ SD cards (times two, since each VCM has two SD cards) containing the correct version of the election.xml file for your precinct. Because of the vast number of SD cards that Comelec has to prepare it is very likely that it will make mistakes in the preparation of these SD cards. For example, the following erroneous election.xml file might be delivered to your precinct, together with the correctly printed ballots.
<contest no=”1″ name=”president”>
<cand row=”11″ column=”1″ no=”5″ name=”Roxas”></cand>
<cand row=”12″ column=”1″ no=”2″ name=”Defensor Santiago”></cand>
<cand row=”11″ column=”7″ no=”5″ name=”Roxas”></cand>
<cand row=”12″ column=”7″ no=”4″ name=”Poe”></cand>
<cand row=”11″ column=”13″ no=”5″ name=”Roxas”></cand>
</contest>
Now with this erroneous election.xml file, together with the correctly printed ballots, all votes on the ballot that are for Binay, Duterte, and Roxas, will go to Roxas, both in the VCM internal count and in the receipt for the voter.
Fortunately, because the VCM will give the voter a receipt indicating the names he has selected for each elective position, the voter, on reading his receipt, can see any error in the assignment of vote mark to candidate. Unfortunately, even if he knows that an error has occurred, the error has already been included in the count for the precinct, and the most that he can do is file a complaint with the Board of Election Inspectors (BEI), who is required to enter the complaint in the Minutes of the Precinct. Since voters do not file election protests (although candidates do), there is no way of acting on voters’ complaints, and the injustice to the voter is never resolved.
It is because of the disenfranchising effect of this kind of error that I have written three times to Comelec, through the Local Source Code Review Committee, requesting Comelec to post all 2000+ distinct ballot faces and all 92,500+ election.xml files at the Comelec website, for the political parties and the public to review and to propose corrections of any errors discovered. After corrections have been made, the 92,500+ corrected election.xml files should be posted, together with their hash values, at the Comelec website. At the start of Election Day, as part of VCM initialization procedure, the hash value of the VCM program, and the hash value of the election.xml file should both be compared with the published known values. Without these hash value checking by the public, the automated election cannot be trusted to properly count our votes. To date, Comelec has not granted our request to post these 92,500+ election.xml files.
