Elections as an instrument of political control 161 cardboard “ballot secrecy folders” for the astronomical price of P380 per folder – was once again, despite a new set of commissioners, the “timon” [controller] of the Smartmatic project. In the words of AES Watch – the multi-sector citizens' coalition made up of groups of academics and school-based organizations, computer industry professionals, information technology experts, various industry associations, civil society groups, peoples' organizations, youth groups, church-based organizations, and assorted advocacy groups – the 2013 automated polls was “a technological and political disaster”. Given the way it was conducted, it could (said AES Watch) be described as neither “automated” nor an “election”. In the conduct of the elections, there were widespread malfunctions in the PCOS voting machines, stalled transmissions of election returns, an inexplicable 44-hour virtual stoppage in transmissions, a glaring tallying error in the national canvassing servers that reported a highly disproportionate vote tally in relation to the number of precincts being tallied, the unauthorized intervention of a Smartmatic programmer to correct program errors while the counting was already in progress, unsecure physical handling and transport of the supposedly sealed CF memory cards, the disappearance of a report on a purportedly “random” manual audit, and other assorted anomalies. In one example – which came to light because of a court order by the Regional Trial Court (Branch 34) in Nueva Ecija province to open the ballot boxes in three precinct clusters in the town of Gapan – it was seen that the PCOS machine registered 781 votes for senatorial candidate Eddie Villanueva, while a manual recount yielded 900 votes. The difference of 119 votes represented a huge 15% alteration in the actual poll results. In another instance that could be indicative of the slipshod manner the 2013 elections were conducted – this case covering the municipality of Dinalupihan in the province of Bataan in Central Luzon – WRAPPED bundles of ballots were reported to be inside 78 of the 80 ballot boxes which were opened pursuant to a Regional Trial Court decision issued two years after the election in response to a formal electoral protest led by losing congressional candidate Felicito Payumo. Additionally, a transmission from the precinct in Barangay Tucop was received by the canvassing server in the Dinalupihan Municipal Hall earlier than 7 pm, when the polls had not yet closed and voting was still going on. In still another example, from Lapu-Lapu City in Cebu province, an examination of the ballot images from PCOS machines in several precincts showed mysterious lines in the images that effectively altered the machine appreciation of the ballot, causing signicantly erroneous counts. The ballot images did not, therefore, “faithfully capture or represent the votes cast by the voter”. Since Comelec and its technology provider Smartmatic had sole possession and absolute control over the re-writable CF memory devices and had the encryption/decryption algorithm that would allow tampering of data