170 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy, Second Edition the Supreme Court effectively ignored all such contra-Smartmatic petitions. So, despite blatant violations of our election laws in 2010 and 2013 and despite abundantly obvious aws in the Smartmatic system, the country's socalled “independent” election body, Comelec, awarded again a supply contract for hardware and software to be used for the 2016 automated elections to the clearly unqualied Smartmatic. It has to be a source of extreme wonderment why the Philippines' top election ofcials – by now, three successive sets of them – were so attached to this dubious and shadowy foreign supplier even if its performance has been nothing short of atrocious and it was never qualied – not being the owner of either the hardware nor the software it was providing – to supply the automation technology in the rst place. As the 2016 elections were nally conducted, Comelec once again refused to enable the use of digital signatures to authenticate and validate electronically transmitted election returns, once again in direct contravention of Republic Act 9369, our Automated Election Law. As previously stressed, this effectively nullies all the transmitted returns because the law requires that these returns must be digitally signed by the authorized election ofcial assigned to a precinct in order to be deemed “ofcial”. In addition to the non-enabling of digital signatures, Comelec introduced a new vulnerability to the many already present in the system by issuing a resolution requiring that the SD memory card that contains the results of the voting in a particular precinct be “imported” into the corresponding city or municipality canavssing computer/server. This meant that the SD cards from the 92,509 precinct voting and counting machines all over the country had to be physically transported to the city or municipality canvassing server corresponding to each precinct and manually fed into the canvassing computer to upload election results. This meant that manually delivered SD cards could be the basis for “ofcial” election results and for proclaiming election winners, and not, as required by law, the election returns (ERs) electronically transmitted from the precincts. What this did was subject the election data and results on the SD memory cards to the possibility of snatching and switching, reminiscent of the snatching and switching of ballot boxes under the old manual election system. Of course, such snatching and switching is far easier to do with tiny SD cards. Furthermore, for the 2016 election exercise, Comelec once again sidestepped R.A. 9369's requirement for a “source code review” of the Smartmatic automated election system software – by political parties and selected independent experts. Comelec offered for review under rather restrictive rules the source code of a software but then announced some 30 days before the May 9 election day that they had to replace that version with another. Complained Edmundo Casiño, a computer science professor and former president of the Philippine Computer Society: “About 30 days before the elections, the Comelec said there would be a change in the source code, even though the code should