144 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy, Second Edition armed thugs to intimidate opposition voters and keep them away from the polling places, and stuffed ballot boxes with fake ballots while those were in transit from provincial polling places to Manila (where the boxes were opened and the votes tallied). Indeed, the distinguished diplomat Carlos P. Romulo – who had been president of the United Nations General Assembly (1949-50) – referred (in a 1956 book) to that 1949 exercise as “the dirty election”. In the next (1953) presidential elections, the American CIA's Edward Lansdale had been widely publicized as having orchestrated the victory of the Nacionalista Party's Ramon Magsaysay through media manipulation and so-called “black operations”. Lansdale himself recounted how the then CIA chief Allen Dulles allocated US$ 5 million in the spy agency's funds for this effort. In the decades since, election rigging tactics have only been rened, adapted to evolving conditions, and improved. By the 1990s, election “operators” – this is what election cheaters were somewhat euphemistically referred to – in certain parts of the Philippines discovered that serious defects in the election procedures promulgated by the country's Commission on Elections (Comelec) and the willing complicity of some election ofcials allowed them to manually alter tally-sheet totals without the need to correspondingly alter the individual entries or the ballots themselves. This opened the door to the massive doctoring of “Certicates of Canvass” (ofcial tally sheets) and provided an easy method of wholesale election cheating. Naturally, Filipinos quickly gave this an evocative street name: “dagdag-bawas” (literally, add-subtract). This dagdagbawas method – add a vote to this candidate, subtract a vote from that candidate – worked because Comelec procedures prescribed a laborious, timeconsuming, and very expensive legal process for opening ballot boxes and verifying a count. Still, dagdag-bawas could be messy because it required an ability to forcibly assume unsupervised control over ofcial tally sheets in a particular area for the time necessary to alter them and, thus, needed a large numbers of “operators” and look-the-other-way ofcials. It had to be expected that someone would eventually recognize that such a basically primitive dagdag-bawas method could be improved by technology. Enter then the automated election system using computers to register and count votes. With computers, the electronic alteration of election returns requires only a single malicious programmer given access to the system by a handful of strategically-placed ofcials. It is far simpler than manual alteration. “Progress” has made rigging the count as easy and as quick as programming a few lines of code into a computer. And “progress” has made the entire rigging process virtually undetectable. The country's Comelec ofcials nally got poll automation implemented nationwide beginning with the 2010 presidential elections. As implemented, Filipino voters are now completely in the dark as to how their votes are counted and have no reasonable way of verifying the count. Signicantly, only the people chosen to oversee this computerized electoral process – installed by the shadowy foreign rm Smartmatic International Inc. – have any access to the