Elections as an instrument of political control 145 vote count. This is violative of the prescribed “public nature of elections”. The electoral process in the Philippines today is now completely untransparent and allows a tiny cabal of insiders to easily manufacture any election outcome desired or specied. This is, to put it bluntly, profoundly undemocratic. The perils of poll automation The “benets” of computerized elections were rst sought to be introduced into this country in April 2003 when former Comelec chairman Benjamin Abalos Sr. awarded a contract to the Mega Pacic Consortium for the lease of 1,900 satellite-based electronic canvassing machines and transmission equipment. This attempt was derailed, however, when several individuals and the Information Technology Foundation of the Philippines led a petition before the Supreme Court seeking to stop implementation of the contract because of non-compliance with technical requirements and “glaring irregularities in the manner in which the bidding process had been conducted”. The Supreme Court agreed and voided the contract, directing the Ombudsman to investigate and le charges against the guilty parties. Sadly, the Ombudsman – at that time Simeon Marcelo – failed to act and, later, in September 2006, the Ombudsman – by that time Merceditas Gutierrez – purposefully absolved all the respondents of both administrative and criminal liabilities. What most people don't realize is that while automated (computerized) polls eliminate some forms of election cheating, new and more dangerous forms are introduced. In fact, wholesale cheating is potentially much easier when polls are automated than when they are not. When elections are manual, wholesale dagdag-bawas – to mean, add votes here and subtract votes there – requires a large crew of “operators”, their minions, and their accomplices (which include bent election ofcials). When elections are automated, all that wholesale cheating requires is one knowledgeable programmer and a handful of strategically-placed ofcials who can provide him with momentary access to the machines or the software or the memory devices or the transmission infrastructure. Prof. David Dill of Stanford University, a computer scientist funded by the US National Science Foundation to investigate technology solutions for automated elections, has said: “We don't know yet how to make computer programs perfectly secure. That is why you always have to have independent reliable ways to check the results. The election can be stolen, nobody can tell, and it's easy to do.” Dill added: “Buggy software is an important problem in computer security. A huge number of problems we have are due to computer software buffer overows, which overwrite computer functions to get control of the machine.” That statement highlights a common method – buffer overows – that hackers (or, more accurately, crackers) use to gain access to a system. It also suggests that even without a malicious takeover, bugs could prevent an election machine from recording and counting votes accurately. Dr. Barbara Simons, a well-known American expert on electronic voting and