The national poll body, the Commission on Elections discovered some errors in the source codes of the Automated Election System (AES), less than three months before the highly anticipated May 9, 2016 national elections. Comelec Chairman Andres Bautista confirmed to the media that there were problems with the source codes of the voting machines.
According to the Comelec chairman, SLI Global Solutions Inc., notified the Comelec that there were problems with the source codes of the consolidated and canvassing system (CCS) and the vote counting machines (VCM).
The Denver-based company, SLI Global Solutions Inc., was contracted by Comelec to verify the source codes of the VCM, CCS and Election Management System (EMS) before they are put together for use in the coming national polls.
During the media interview, the Comelec chairman was quoted as saying “In a way, they are our independent adviser and in doing their work, their job is to look for things in the system that need to either be addressed, improved or rectified. Over the past few days, they have seen certain findings which they believe should be addressed,” Bautista said.
Last Monday, Comelec had to postpone depositing the source codes at the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas after SLI detected compatibility problems in the CCS. SLI found that while the CCS had to be “stand alone,” the system was found to be “network dependent.” This prompted the Comelec to re-do the “trusted build” of the EMS, which serves as the brain of the entire system.
According to the Comelec’s records, the VCM and the CCS was supplied by the joint venture of Smartmatic-Total Information Management Corp.
