162 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy, Second Edition on the devices without obvious signs of such tampering, it is clear at whose doorstep this tampering should be laid. With absolutely no cooperation from Comelec, which seemed bent on acting precisely to ensure that there was no longer any way of retrieving data or verifying its integrity, AES Watch doggedly investigated reported anomalies and released its “Final Report” on the May 2013 automated polls ve months later. Held at the University of the Philippines Law Center, this “2nd PostElection Conference” was given the title Raping Democracy: What Rule of Law?, which made it rather clear what conclusions had been reached. The collective assessment: “The 2013 polls was one of the worst devastations that has ever struck the nation.” To list the noteworthy discoveries established by AES Watch's investigations: 1) A huge discrepancy of 59 million votes between the Comelec list of winning senatorial candidates (June 5, 2013) and the Comelec public access website (May 17, 2013); 2) An unexplained and very disproportional 12million vote surge only two hours after polls closed; 3) A canvassing marked by long interruptions and apparent tampering of the program (meaning that there was no publicly transparent and uninterrupted counting of votes as mandated by the election code and the poll automation law); 4) An apparent attempt to cover up the election blunders and anomalies through post-election excess ballot printing and the killing of two reporters/whistle-blowers; 5) The existence of a suspicious 60-30-10 nal sharing of canvassed votes (among the LP coalition team, the UNA team, and the independents) which was found true at all levels of the canvassed votes, from the clustered precincts to municipalities/cities, provinces, regions, and the national canvass (as determined by Ateneo University mathematics professor Felix Muga II); 6) No conclusive review of the missing voting source code and no credible random manual audit of the polls; 7) Disabling by Comelec and Smartmatic of various mandated-by-law safeguards and security requirements; and 8) Absence of digital signatures on all election returns and, hence, no legal basis for proclaiming “winning” candidates. It is especially important to emphasize that, in both the 2010 and 2013 automated poll exercises, Comelec did away with personal digital signatures even if many observers and election watchdog groups have been screaming that our poll automation law (R.A. 8436 as amended by R.A. 9369) specically requires that “The election returns transmitted electronically and digitally signed shall be considered as ofcial elections results and shall be used as the basis for the canvassing of votes and the proclamation of a candidate.” In addition, the Terms of Reference of the Comelec contract with Smartmatic species that “The system shall transmit digitally signed and encrypted election results and reports enabled by public/private key cryptography to provide authenticity, integrity, and non-repudiation utilizing at least a 128-bit encryption scheme [emphasis in the original].”