Elections as an instrument of political control 175 instances, Smartmatic and Comelec claimed that the change was minor and did not affect the election results. Still, such recurring unlawful interventions or socalled “minor” changes, while canvassing is already going on, must give rise to suspicions that something else – like electoral manipulation or fraud – is happening. To repeat, such interventions are expressly prohibited by our automated election law and the fact that Smartmatic had access to the system while canvassing was already in progress is an unacceptable security defect. That our Commission on Elections remained bent on foisting the awed Smartmatic system on the Filipino people is a rather telling indicator that there is a conspiracy in place to electronically control Philippine elections. In the 2016 presidential elections, as in earlier automated elections, the unlawful Smartmatic intervention puts the entire canvassing process in serious doubt. The integrity of the automated results can now be reasonably questioned. Thus far (and as expected), Comelec has simply ignored the demands of poll watchdogs and IT experts for a full system audit. Because of perceived anomalies, statistical analyses of election results, correlating these with transmissions information and other data as are made publicly available at this time, are also currently being undertaken by various critical observers. In a rather shocking – shocking because it surfaced at all – revelation reported by investigative reporter Christine Herrera of the Manila Standard, a group of IT experts assigned to Comelec's National Technical Support Center (NTSC) disclosed that they had been hired to “x” 30 canvassing servers that had been transported at 5 pm on May 9th – that is, shortly after the polls closed on election day – to the Comelec site in Sta. Rosa, Laguna. Their task, they said, was to introduce new scripts [program code] to generate falsied “Certicates of Canvass”. What these whistleblowers revealed is that some 2.65 million votes were generated from four contested provinces. Relatedly, Comelec had earlier forced the awarding of the contract for the operation of the NTSC to Smartmatic, even if it was not the lowest bidder, by the now-common tactic of disqualifying the lowest bidder. This prompted the lowest bidder – the joint venture of Northern Worx KPO Inc., NextIX Inc., and Kit Properties Inc. – to le, on March 31, 2016, a case against Comelec and Smartmatic before the Supreme Court. The “Petition for Certiorari, Prohibition, and Mandamus” asked the Court to compel the Comelec to issue a restraining order and award the contract to the Northern Worx joint venture for having submitted the lowest calculated responsive bid – P90.88 million versus Smartmatic's bid of P122.71 million (which, interestingly, is only 40 centavos less than Comelec's approved budget for the project). No action was taken by the Court on this petition which is why, signicantly, Smartmatic was again the designated operator of the NTSC for the 2016 elections. At this time, this report of server rigging in Laguna has yet to be conrmed because the whistleblowing IT experts have thus far chosen to remain