Elections as an instrument of political control 177 not have to be pointed out that that person can report any count he wishes and no one need be the wiser. The defenders of Comelec's seriously awed implementation of an automated election system (in 2010, 2013, and 2016) – these include certain leading politicians and well-known columnists – exhibit an ignorance that has to be deliberate, since it has to be assumed that these personalities possess at least a reasonable level of intelligence. The arguments they put up – that there is “no hard evidence that the PCOS has been fraudulently used” and that there is “no factual nor legal basis… for accusations of poll rigging” – have by now taken the character of a mantra that they seem to have been taught to keep repeating on the premise (a la Goebbels) that, if you say a lie often enough, people will eventually believe it. They could be right about this but, if so, it will not be because computer experts, IT industry professionals, academics, and concerned civic groups have not been trying to inform the people of the truth. It should be stressed again that Comelec ofcials had made conscious and deliberate decisions to eliminate all the ways whereby the public and independent observers might collect hard evidence of election rigging. As part of its awed implementation, Comelec had disregarded standard computer security protocols and completely removed the required system safeguards that could have allowed citizens to verify their votes, validate the count, and ensure the integrity of election results. These actions by Comelec actions constituted gross – and brazen – violations of the country's automated elections law and its omnibus election code. Notwithstanding the barriers deliberately erected by Comelec to shield what its machines were doing from the public's eyes and make it virtually impossible for candidates and voters to obtain “hard evidence” to prove poll rigging, such hard evidence had been found in the comparatively few instances when circumstances and court orders actually made it possible to open the ballot boxes and compare the machine count with an examination of the physical ballots. Hard evidence of electronic tampering – and network intrusion – could also be discerned when it was possible to examine the logs of the electronic transmission of results from the precinct counting machines to the central canvassing servers. The election rigging evidence already cited had been obtained in spite of the obstacles maliciously created by Comelec to prevent the gathering of such evidence of poll manipulation. If Comelec only did not deliberately remove all the mechanisms whereby the public and independent observers could verify, validate, and authenticate election results, there would doubtless be a greater preponderance of evidence of election rigging. The problems intrinsic to an automated election are inextricably linked to the procedures and protocols followed in its implementation: these must incorporate mechanisms that allow the polls to be transparent to observers and open to the public at large. Without such mechanisms that provide transparency, an automated election must be