154 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy, Second Edition shortcutting procedures, glossing over voter's rights and the principle of 'secret voting, public counting' and, inevitably, bypassing strict constitutional and legal requirements”. Comelec's relationship with Smartmatic – “a Venezuelan rm with reported American connections” – had been suspicious from the outset. Comelec's bending over backward to accommodate Smartmatic – for example, adjusting pre-qualication requirements to favor Smartmatic, agreeing to one of the “sweetest” payment terms ever, neglecting to hold Smartmatic accountable for failing to meet various delivery commitments, changing rules and allowing Smartmatic “to call the shots almost every step of the way”, etc. – was obvious. It was blindingly clear to observers that the Comelec-Smartmatic relationship was not that of the normal client-supplier kind. In fact, the dominance of Smartmatic in the relationship with Comelec was more suggestive of a rather common type of malicious conspiracy. “Until now,” CenPEG accused, “Comelec cannot even explain convincingly how and why election results reached national canvassing servers so fast – starting even an hour before the ofcial closure of voting – especially when the automated election system at the precinct level was hounded by technical breakdowns and irregularities.” How indeed? Even the conduct of the “random manual audit”, an intended validation tool, was so bungled by the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV), an organization that used to be a citizens' election watchdog group but could no longer be legitimately considered one because it had been so slavishly supportive of all Comelec actions and decisions. In fact, the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines–National Secretariat for Social Action released a letter revealing that it no longer supported PPCRV as a citizens' election arm. (Expectedly, Comelec tasked PPCRV again in May 2013 to conduct the supposedly “random” manual audit and, expectedly, it bungled this again, taking some two months to nally release the results.) In actual reality, Melo's term as Comelec chairman had been a backward step in the Philippines' efforts to achieve meaningful electoral reform. Furthermore, Melo's actuations as Comelec chairman showed no indication that he cared at all about safeguarding “the sanctity of our country's electoral process”. Not only did he permit a foreign rm (Smartmatic) to violate it, he also allowed that foreign rm to spirit away P7.2 billion of the people's money in the process. In addition, despite a Supreme Court decision directing the Comelec to release crucial election documents and data to various petitioning groups, Melo's Comelec refused to do so. That was nothing less than criminal. Said CenPEG, “The right to public information suffered with Comelec's lack of transparency.” Concluded CenPEG, “Its lack of transparency left the majority of the electorate misinformed and uninformed, duped by the illusion about automated elections modernizing democracy and weeding out fraud.”