148 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy, Second Edition function like, say, Checksum) when the individual voting machines are turned on at each polling place on election day. In the 2010 computerized polls, Comelec did not – in direct and blatant violation of law – provide the software source code that could be properly reviewed by political parties, citizens' election watchdog groups, and independent observers. Automated cheating can also be easily accomplished by just changing the conguration settings on the compact ash (CF) cards, the memory devices that contain the instructions that tell the optical scan voting machines how to appreciate a particular ballot. This is the reason why the original prescribed specication for these CF cards is that these should be non-rewritable (that is to say, “write-once” only). The intention of that “non-rewritable” specication is that, once the conguration has been written into a write-once CF card, it should no longer be capable of being overwritten and modied. This requirement is supposed to prevent the CF cards that are installed into the voting machines deployed to the individual voting precincts from being altered so as to “mis-appreciate” the ballots of voters. “Mis-appreciation” of ballots would mean that certain shaded boxes might no longer be read as votes for the intended candidate. (Note: A cruder way of cheating the voting machine's optical scanner and thus causing the “mis-appreciation” of ballots is by causing slight printing misalignments on the ballots or by placing invisible-to-thenaked-eye marks on the spaces for favored candidates so that shading any other candidate's space would invalidate the entire ballot. Obviously, however, such methods would require access to the printing process or to the ballots prior to their deployment to the polling precincts.) In the 2010 computerized polls, Comelec, contrary to its own specied requirements, acquired and used rewritable (“write-many”) CF cards. Finally, automated cheating can also be done during the data transmission and tally consolidation stage if the cheater has privileged knowledge that gives him access to the communications system. Although encrypted data might be impossible to intercept, decrypt, and alter by an outside hacker/cracker working from scratch during the few minutes when the precinct voting machines are actually online (to transmit their vote count), it can be readily decrypted and altered in minutes by an insider with the proper authentication codes and digital (electronic) keys. The original system design would have provided each BEI [Board of Election Inspectors] ofcial a unique private digital key which he/she would use for signing/encrypting the election results transmitted from his/her particular polling place. That would allow each election return received by the national canvassing servers (computers) to be authenticated as to its sender and veried that it is legitimate and had not been altered during transmission. Non-use of private digital keys for the BEI ofcials effectively prevents the proper authentication and verication of transmitted election returns. This opens the door to anonymous machines from unknown