Elections as an instrument of political control 147 process design such as the following: how the software source code would be kept in a Central Bank vault to protect it from possible tampering, how this software code and other precinct-specic data would be loaded onto a separate non-rewritable memory card to be inserted into each machine just before it is transported to its designated polling place, how each machine is sealed and can only be operated by those with the proper digital keys, how ballots would have bar codes and other security features, how digital signatures using 128-bit encryption would be used to ensure the security of data during transmission, how ultraviolet detection would be used to authenticate ballots, and how the machines would be secured during transit and at the polling places. Notwithstanding these pronouncements, the automated election system that Comelec – then headed by former Supreme Court Associate Justice Jose Melo (as Chairman) – eventually insisted on using for the 2010 polls disregarded most of these security features and safeguards. Standard IT [Information Technology] protocols – including those specically provided for by the Automated Election System Law (Republic Act 9369) and the country's Omnibus Election Code – were set aside or disabled for the May 2010 polls. As a result, the integrity of the system, from the outset, was fatally compromised. The system was provided by the foreign reseller Smartmatic International Inc. – in apparent joint venture with a local company, Total Information Management Corp. (TIM), presumably to meet a citizenship requirement – and consisted of some 82,000 PCOS [Precinct Count Optical Scanner] voting and counting machines, laptop canvassing computers for vote consolidation, and the corresponding software for both. Smartmatic was curiously pushed by Comelec's leadership even if it was patently unqualied to bid for the project in the rst place. Pursuant to Comelec's own Bidding Specications and Terms of Reference which (among other things) required that the bidder be the owner of both the hardware and the software that it proposed to supply, Smartmatic should have been disqualied since it was merely a reseller. The Comelec's project-in-charge and main champion was Executive Director Jose Tolentino Jr. Automated cheating can be accomplished wholesale by introducing altered software code – the detailed instructions that the computer is programmed to follow – into each voting machine or canvassing server at any time before the opening of polls on election day. This can be done by those who have – or can gain – free access to the machines and to the memory devices even for just a few minutes. The altered code can be written so that it is triggered only at the time actual voting or counting starts – meaning, it remains inactive while the test or “zeroing” runs are done – and is then erased once the results are transmitted. That means that any evidence of electronic dagdag-bawas will no longer exist. That possibility is the reason for the requirement that the software source code has to be reviewed by all concerned parties, certied by all as acceptable, loaded into the machines under trusted supervision, secured properly, and then veried for the software copy's integrity (using a “hash value generator”