146 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy, Second Edition encryption systems, is the co-author (with Douglas Jones) of a book, entitled Broken Ballots (2012), that details the risks of computerized elections. A critic of automated polls, Simons stressed in 2008 that, “Anyone with access to the election software of a major voting machine vendor can change the outcome of a national election. Election fraud can now be committed on a national, not just a local, basis….” She emphasized further, “Having the software source code doesn't guarantee that you will detect critical software bugs or malicious code… if you are going to subvert software, you are not going to do something that will be found by a checklist. It's easy to insert a Trojan Horse into the software because the testing won't nd it.” A Ph.D. in computer science from UC Berkeley, Simons worked for many years at IBM Research, taught at Stanford University, was a past president of the United States' Association for Computing Machinery, and was a member of the Advisory Board of the Federal Election Assistance Commission that has been re-evaluating the voting technology in use in the United States. In an extensive review of electronic voting systems in the U.S. state of California, security experts “found signicant security aws in all of the manufacturers' voting systems, aws that could allow a single non-expert to compromise an entire election”. Studied by the experts from the University of California were the solutions of Diebold Election Systems, Sequoia Voting Systems, Hart InterCivic, and Elections Systems and Software, all leading suppliers of automated election systems. In another study by computer scientists from Princeton University, it was determined that electronic voting systems were “insecure” and that “votestealing software could be installed in less than a minute”. That kind of knowledge explains why the trend in the U.S. – in the light of several close contested races in various states – has veered away from fully automated systems and toward partly manual, paper-based systems where counting and tallying can be easily veried by independent observers. All automated election systems can be hacked from the outside, given enough time and the incentives to do it. The more dangerous possibility, however, is that the automated election system is manipulated from the inside, by a cabal with a malicious agenda and the desire to exploit their insider access to the system for personal gain. With insider access, the rigging of automated polls is an easy walk in the park. Electronic dagdag-bawas, compared to manual dagdag-bawas, is like the difference between just needing to fry an egg for breakfast and having to whip up a full-course dinner for hundreds of guests. Prior to the Philippines' rst nationwide automated elections in May 2010, Commission on Election ofcials made a determined attempt to “sell” the system they were implementing to the various stakeholders – including election watchdog groups and independent observers – by explaining its security features and how the vulnerabilities of automated systems could be minimized. In this effort, they described what security safeguards were built into the