58 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy conducted a systematic evaluation of the entire automation process and came out with the following conclusions: The high incidence of technical hitches, blunders, voting procedural errors, and other operational failures throughout the country during the May 10, 2010 automated elections can be attributed to the defective automated election system adopted by the COMELEC. Among others, the AES was defective because it was not properly tested, its software programs were proven to contain many bugs and other deficiencies, and the infrastructures for a successful automated election (from transmission to road networks and power systems) were not ready. Moreover, it was aggravated by the lack of safeguards, security and reliability measures, as well as timely and effective continuity/contingency measures. Among CenPEG's findings were: mismatched time and date stamps on all PCOS machines; transmission failures; erroneous COCs (certificates of canvass) in at least 57 provinces and cities; ballots and CF cards delivered manually for canvassing; discovery of the console port in all machines making the PCOS vulnerable to tampering; erroneous entries of total number of voters and votes cast in the national canvassing center and Congress; near anarchy at the clustered precincts; and, not to forget, the pre-election incidence of defective CF cards. (The CenPEG Report on the May 2010 Automated Elections in the Philippines 2010: 289) Further casting doubts on the integrity of the May 2010 automated elections, the Philippine Computer Society (PCS) observed that the process was mismanaged because the COMELEC and Smartmatic-TIM did not follow technical requirements, including security features, mandated by the automation law and the terms of reference of the bidding for the automated system. Among the problems cited by PCS president Nelson Celis and director Edmundo Casino were: delays in the preparations of a process that normally takes about 18 months compared with less than a year for the COMELEC; lack of certification attesting to the 99.995 percent accuracy of the system [an American firm, SysTest Lab, Inc., provided a certification but called for compliance with many “compensating controls” not met by COMELEC]; removal of security safeguards such as digital signatures and UV security mark censors; and no independent review of the hash/source code. (Ubac 2010: 1A12) With its long history of institutionalized violence, systematic fraud and manipulation, and clientelist-patronage ties between national and local politicians and bureaucrats, electoral processes in the Philippines can hardly be considered as free and fair, a necessary procedural requirement of functioning democratic regimes. As can be seen more specifically in electoral contests since