In Search of Credible Elections and Parties: The Philippine Paradox 57 The radical shift to an automated election system on a national scale starting with the 2010 elections faced numerous problems ranging from legal and constitutional questions to procedural and technical ones. With its poor historical record of electoral governance, the COMELEC was widely seen as lacking the overall institutional and technical capability to successfully carry out its mandate under the law. For instance, the COMELEC never allowed the review of the program's source code by any interested political party or group even while this was mandated by the law itself and with a number of groups demanding such a review.11 In spite of several technical problems attending the automation process including the malfunctioning of compact memory flash cards in a field test case made a week before election day, automated voting took place as scheduled on May 10, 2010. With the speedy counting and tabulation in which votes tallied for national positions reached about 90 percent of the clustered precinct totals in less than 48 hours, the COMELEC declared the automated elections a success. There was general public acceptance of the election results because these matched to a great degree the pre-election survey readings and exit polls at the national level, particularly for the presidential contest.12 However, an assessment of the automated election system by civil society groups that closely monitored the entire process ranged from qualified endorsement to highly critical evaluations. In its terminal report on the May 2010 elections, NAMFREL noted that the “automated election system employed by the Commission on Elections and provided by Smartmatic is in serious need of review and remedial measures before it is to be used for future elections.” (NAMFREL 2010: 1) Among the specific problems in the process, NAMFREL identified the following: The mismatching of time and date stamps, the lack of digital signatures, the lack of a complete inventory of PCOS (Precinct Count Optical Scan) machines (including spares) and CF (Compact Flash) cards (including all replacements), lack of disclosure of source codes and hash codes, the incompleteness of the Random Manual Audit, the incompleteness of electoral counts on servers of PPCRV, KBP, COMELEC, and the political parties form just a partial list of deficiencies of the overall system. Collectively, these deficiencies led to the lack of traceability and auditability of the process from the time a ballot is inserted into a PCOS machine until it is ultimately counted and canvassed. Had results not matched public expectation, these elections may have been questioned and chaos may have resulted. (NAMFREL 2010: 1)13 With its core of IT consultants and networking with like-minded groups formed in the Automated Election System (AES) Watch, the research and advocacy NGO, the Center for Peoples' Empowerment Governance (CenPEG)