Philippine election officials insisted yesterday that next week’s polls would go ahead, amid frantic efforts to replace more than 70,000 faulty memory cards that were to be used in vote counting machines.
The Commission on Elections has come under enormous pressure since revealing the technical glitch, with Philippine President Gloria Arroyo’s office saying the vote may need to be delayed.
But election commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal said Monday’s election, when 50 million people are eligible to choose a new president and thousands of other government positions, would go ahead as planned.
PHOTO: REUTERS
“I truly believe we will have an election on May 10,” Larrazabal said at a press conference to brief the media on how the problems would be resolved.
Presidential spokesman Gary Olivar said earlier yesterday that a delay may be needed to ensure the nation’s first attempt at a computerized election count was credible.
“I would imagine that the success of the automation ... is more important than the timing,” Olivar said.
“Nobody benefits from a foul-up ... if technical issues require more time and require us to delay, that is not an unreasonable judgment to make,” he said.
The Commission on Elections said on Tuesday that they had discovered memory cards for more than 76,000 vote-counting machines had been configured incorrectly and would have to be replaced.
The vendor, Smartmatic-TIM, said testing at the start of this week revealed the faulty memory cards made the machines unable to read names of candidates on paper ballots.
Election monitors deployed by candidates said the machines also wrongly transferred votes to rivals.
Larrazabal said it would be a tough challenge to get the fresh memory cards to all the machines across the sprawling archipelago of more than 7,000 islands.
“It is a major logistical problem, but our goal is to get it done,” he said.
“We now have to write [the codes] into the cards, bring them to the provinces and then swap them with the old ones, test and seal them again.”
He said helicopters belonging to the armed forces and private companies such as beer giant San Miguel would be used to fly the replacement chips across the country.
Votes in previous Philippine elections were counted by hand, a process that was extremely vulnerable to cheating and meant results sometimes took weeks to be announced.
The government decided to introduce a computerized system at a cost of 7.2 billion pesos (US$163 million) in an effort to shorten the vote-tallying process to a few days and to minimize the potential for cheating.
However the setback has fueled suspicions aired in the local media that the automated election process was designed to fail.
Security analysts have warned that such a breakdown could allow for a power-grab by elements within the military loyal to Arroyo.
Arroyo’s critics have accused her of wanting to try and extend her time in power after June 30, when constitutional term limits require her to step down, but she has insisted she is preparing for an orderly succession.
Even if the elections go ahead, questions about their credibility may also force supporters of losing presidential candidates to take to the streets.
Presidential frontrunner Benigno Aquino, a fierce Arroyo critic, has already warned of mass protests if he loses.
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS