172 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy, Second Edition election could not legally proceed without such a Certication. This forced Comelec to nally – and hurriedly – release such a Certication on May 5th, four days before the elections. No independent observers seem able to conrm that the TEC actually performed all the necessary tests and procedures for the issuance of such a Certication. In a related development showcasing Comelec's laxness in IT security matters, its website and election database was hacked on March 27, 2016 giving the hackers access to the personal data – including names, addresses, ngerprints and other biometrics – of 55 million Filipino voters. Comelec could not give any satisfactory answer regarding the security measures it put in place to protect the integrity of the election database. Neither could it give any satisfactory answer as to how it expected to deal with the hacking and ensure that voter registration data to be used for the elections was unaltered data. This hacking created cheating opportunities that could disenfranchise groups of voters and enfranchise others. Indeed, Comelec's reaction was totally illogical: after spending millions to re-register voters in order to get their biometric information and trumpeting all across the land that “no bio, no boto [vote]”, the entire 2016 election was conducted without any biometric verication of voters whatsoever and no serious attempt to even verify voters' identities at the precincts. It was as if Comelec decision makers had reasoned that since they couldn't ensure the integrity of the voters' registration data, they would just ignore it completely. It was as if Comelec couldn't care less who voted or how they voted probably because the election count would be manipulated anyway. In a laudable effort to enable some post-election audit capability in spite of the non-transparency of the whole automated election system and the disabling or non-enabling by Comelec of mechanisms for validating, authenticating, and auditing the election results, computer forensic expert Al Vitangcol led on May 2, 2016 a “Petition for Mandamus” with the Philippine Supreme Court. This sought to compel Comelec to submit the Media Access Control (MAC) addresses – globally unique identiers of network devices – of all the voting and counting machines, laptops, transmission devices, and all canvassing servers (central and transparency), this to include the IP [Internet Protocol] addresses – numerical labels assigned to devices on a computer network – used in the Comelec's VPN [Virtual Private Network]. The Supreme Court gave Comelec 10 days in which to le a comment on this petition. Thus far, Comelec has not commented. As of this writing, the Supreme Court had not taken any further action and any action it now takes would be useless.. Following Mr. Vitangcol's petition, a lawyer, Atty. Al Argosino, led another “Petition for Mandamus” wherein he asked the Supreme Court to direct Comelec to provide the International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) of all the SIM cards as well as the International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) for all the communication devices to be used by Comelec during the transmission of election results. No action on this petition was taken either.