Press Statement

June 4, 2013

Renato M. Reyes, Jr, Bayan Secretary General

Smartmatic is trying to dupe people again through the disinformation posted on its website according to the Bagong Alyansang Makabayan. If we are to believe the company’s posts found on Philippine site , it would appear that the elections in the Philippines were smooth, efficient, transparent and problem-free.

In its website, Smartmatic claims:

“Following the successful May 2010 General Elections, the Republic of the Philippines was set to conduct another massive e-voting project – the Midterm Elections of May 2013.

Once again, Smartmatic played a vital role in this year’s elections byproviding technology and services to contribute with the overall efficiency and transparency of the process.

Smartmatic also supplied the compact flash cards for the voting machines, and the modems to transmit data from precincts to tallying centers.

The Commission on Elections (Comelec) recently bought from Smartmatic the 82,200 voting machines that were used. Those are the same machines which COMELEC leased and used to great success in 2010. The machines were deployed in most of the 7,100 islands comprising the archipelago nation. 18,022 national and local posts were decided by 52,333,801 voters.”

(all underscoring by Smartmatic).

Smartmatic makes the amazing claim that they provide technology for “better run elections”. Nothing could be farther from the truth. As we have seen from our experience in 2013, there is neither transparency or reliability with the Smartmatic system. This foreign company sold us unreliable PCOS machines. Some 18,000 units failed to transmit results on election day. We also take not of the absence of transparency in the system as no real and credible source code review by interested parties were ever done. The source code in fact only arrived in the Philippines just a few days before the elections. Smartmatic also failed to mention in its website the many documented problems with their CF cards during the 2013 polls. It failed to mention discrepancies in the electronic results and the random manual audit. It failed to mention that it will likely face a congressional probe for the conduct of the polls. Right now, so many groups have raised doubts about the results of the 2013 elections.

Smartmatic is now using the Philippines as a showcase for its international operations. According to reports reaching us, Smartmatic recently attended an international conference last week where it claimed that the polls in the Philippines were a huge success. Smartmatic now wants other countries to follow the Philippine example.

We call on other countries who may have been taken by Smartmatic’s initial PR pitch to exercise extreme caution and due diligencewhen dealing with this corporation. In the Philippines, we are now embarking on a campaign to junk the PCOS system provided by Smartmatic based on our experience in 2010 and 2013. We thus call on the people of other countries to reject Smartmatic and its automated election technology. ###