160 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy, Second Edition University computer security expert Dan Wallach averred that “even New York's standards, if somehow met [Dominion/Sequoia did not meet them], would not secure these systems from fraud”. In an interview, Mr. Wallach said, “This is a classic computer security problem. Whoever gets into the machine rst wins. So if the Trojan horse software is in there rst, you ask it to test itself, it will always lie to you and tell you everything is ne. And no matter what testing code you try to add after the fact, it's too late.” In Chicago, software programmer and investigative journalist Brad Friedman wrote in early 2011 that Sequoia president Jack Blaine had been “lying” about Sequoia's “continuing relationship with the Chavez-tied Venezuelan rm (Smartmatic).” He then added, “The company's new owners, Dominion, have been keeping up the tradition of deception.” Friedman had been warning Chicago voters of the “100% unveriability of any and every vote cast on that system… (citing) a litany of failures of both the voting system and the company who originally sold it to a number of gullible election jurisdictions across the country”. He observed that the Sequoia system “has been hacked many times, and is still-hackable in a multitude of ways” and that “(t)he paper trail is not actually counted by anyone, no matter what it says, as the system relies on the internally recorded, 100% unveriable, completely invisible-to-voters tally done by the computer system”. He pointed to a recent video that “shows how simple it is for an election insider, in a matter of seconds, armed with little more than a $10 thumb drive, to game the system in such a way that even a 100% hand-count of those so-called 'veriable paper audit trails' would be unlikely to reveal that the election run on them had been completely rigged.…” To emphasize, the Smartmatic system, if institutionalized in this country, is a dangerous political development. Yet, few – whether politicians or ordinary voters – seem to care about the danger. It appears that more weight is being given to the ululations of those who understand virtually nothing about a technical subject than to the studied pronouncements of real technical experts. One industry expert noted ruefully that the Smartmatic issue “is now being dominated by the opinions of sophists and non-IT experts who cannot distinguish between a quality-assured and secure system from one that is untrusted and non-transparent. The problem is that they think that they can just deplore the research work done by technical specialists. No wonder this country is in such a miserable state”. Indeed. The 2013 automated polls Despite all the “glitches” and the performance failures of Smartmatic in the conduct of the 2010 automated polls, Comelec chairman Brillantes and his fellow commissioners continued to bend over backwards to accommodate whatever Smartmatic wanted. Many observers thought it signicant that Comelec executive director Jose Tolentino Jr. – who was supposed to be suspended because of the anomalous deal in 2010 wherein Comelec bought