198 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy, Second Edition exercise has been compromised by foreign interference.19 Outsourcing the technology to foreign suppliers has turned the election process into a business transaction and prot making given the billions of pesos involved much of which, since 2010, has not been properly audited. The notion of “modernization” has been equated simplistically with “speed” in the election process. But even the exercise itself has been derailed by massive transmission failures and voter disenfranchisements – in many respects dangerously compared to the old manual system. Clearly, the use of new technology – awed as it has been – has not transformed the electoral process into a level playing eld nor has it neutralized the undue advantages enjoyed by dynastic politicians. As election watchdogs concluded, under automation cheating has morphed into electronic fraud. The very act of voting is now taken over by the machine with all its systems incomprehensible to the voter. Under automation, who controls the technology controls the vote. The architects of poll automation forget the fact that modernization involves not just simply adopting a new technology but, rst and foremost, upgrading the capabilities – not to mention the basic scientic expertise - of the very institution tasked to oversee the whole modernization process. In September 2015, the policy think tank Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG), summed up before the Joint Congressional Oversight Committee on AES (JCOC-AES) chaired by Sen. Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel the failure of automation modernization in the country's election system. Excerpts of the CenPEG statement20 read: …A collusion continues to reign based on money and political expediency among power players to allow a foreign company – Smartmatic-TIM – to monopolize the supply of election technology and hardware, worse, to control the country's sovereign electoral process despite this company's questionable credentials and without any credible system of audit and accountability as deterrent to the manipulation of poll results. …Various state authorities – including the Comelec, Malacañang, Congress through its suffrage committees and JCOC, and procurement bodies – have simply failed to discharge their constitutionally-mandated functions in ensuring that elections are transparent and secured, voting is veriable, votes are duly authenticated and electronically-transmitted without glitch, counting is accurate, and election results are credible. They all remain hostage to the power of political expedience and opportunism not to scientic studies and compliance to laws they themselves framed and claim to abide with. Promises of electoral reforms and those on FOI, political dynasties and job security are entirely forgotten when money and patronage politics come into play. Especially in election season, patronage politics and money make even