Elections as an instrument of political control 149 senders transmitting bogus (fabricated) returns to the canvassing servers consolidating vote tallies. Signicantly for the 2010 computerized polls, all the electronic keys to be used for digital signing (meaning, encryption) were supposed to have been generated and issued to the authorized election ofcials by Smartmatic personnel. This would have given this foreign rm tremendous – and unprecedented (and unconstitutional) – power over Philippine elections. Conceivably, they would have been able to manufacture election returns with any desired result. It was also imaginable that the award of a P7.2 billion contract to a relatively young, relatively untried Venezuelan company might have been bought in exchange for valuable bits of election magic. In the end, though, Smartmatic simplied the “magic” that had to be performed by just doing away completely with the digital signing of election returns by the bylaw-mandated election ofcials. This permitted the easy inux of phony returns from anonymous machines and making it impossible for independent outside entities to validate the authenticity of transmitted election results. Local IT industry pioneer Augusto Lagman – drawing from his experience running the computer tallying systems used by citizens' poll watchdog Namfrel [National Movement for Free Elections] for its quick-count operations in ten national elections since 1984 – additionally pointed out new things that can go wrong in automated elections. For instance, unlike in past manual elections when there was only one kind of ballot, the May 2010 automated polls featured 1,630 versions of the printed ballot because the candidates' names would now have to be printed on the ballot beside appropriately located boxes for shading by voters. Thus, the possibility of printing errors and misplaced (or omitted) names was multiplied exponentially. Further, printing of those ballots needed to be precise and the boxes (for shading) precisely aligned or the optical mark reader in the machine might not read each ballot correctly. This would cause counting errors. Moreover, Lagman noted, each version of the 1,630 ballots would have to be delivered specically to the assigned polling place. If there was a logistical mix-up, the ballots “misdelivered” could not be used – the machines would spit them out – and so voters simply could not vote. It was not difcult to imagine the kind of chaos that would ensue at any polling place where these mishaps might occur. Meanwhile, a group organized by Lagman called <www.TransparentElections.org.ph> developed and proposed an “open election system” wherein transmission of returns is done electronically and canvassing is automated, but manual voting and counting is retained at the precinct level. The beauty of that approach was that it would achieve the benets of automation – results can still be known in 24 hours or less – while maintaining the transparency demanded for results to be credible and acceptable. Because people will have watched the vote counting, the Election Return, or ER, would remain a “trusted document” that can be matched by anyone against the public tally to be displayed on a secure read-only website.