BAGUIO, Philippines – The National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel) has urged the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to make transmission logs and other automated election system (AES) data public while reiterating that there were no observable anomalies in the May 2022 elections.

Responding to queries from reporters in Baguio on Thursday, September 7, Namfrel Chairperson Angel Averia Jr. said the persistent allegations of fraud “are rooted in the non-transparency of the automated election system and the lack of transparency in its implementation.”

Averia, who was in Baguio for the second leg of his group’s “Maging Bantay ng Bayan” election and good governance monitoring training project, was responding to former Information and Communications Technology secretary Eliseo Rio‘s allegations about possible manipulation of the May 2022 election results, citing several transmissions from a single private IP (internet protocol) address.

“As torchbearers of Bantay ng Bayan, Namfrel provides a thoughtful and objective analysis of the allegations, as well as a thorough review of the reception logs and raw files posted on the website of the Commission on Elections,” read part of a Namfrel statement.

The group also stood by their findings that “based on the data made available, Namfrel did not observe any anomalies in the automated counting of votes and the electronic transmission of election results” during the last elections.

While the election watchdog agrees with the observation of the use of the private IP address 192.168.0.2, they argued that there was no evidence from the uploaded files that there was a “secret local area network” transmitting “fabricated election results or spurious election returns.”

Transparency issues

“Unlike before, people can see how their votes are counted, including the preparation of election returns. Now, under the AES, all of these processes are hidden behind the voting machine, making it non-transparent and a matter of concern,” Averia said.

He pointed out that the random manual audit, provided for by law, only deals with precinct results, not the entire transmission process, including municipal, city, and provincial canvasses.

Averia said this is why they have repeatedly recommended the inclusion of a system audit, a standard practice in the information technology industry.

“That is one of our proposals that should be implemented for automated elections. We need to have a system audit to ensure that the machine functions as intended, in accordance with its purpose during the elections,” he said. – Rappler.com