Elections as an instrument of political control 151 area. The rst ballot box opened immediately revealed evidence of electronic hocus-pocus. The manual recount showed that Wagas got 288 votes and Quiño got 214 votes, whereas the PCOS machine count had previously given Quiño 468 votes and Wagas 289 votes. Signicantly also according to a SunStar report, only two out of 34 clustered precincts in Compostela transmitted election returns (ERs) and out of the 32 untransmitted, the PCOS machines actually generated only 20 ERs whose serial numbers did not tally with the serial numbers of the PCOS machines. The nal manual tally reversed the PCOS electronic count and showed that Wagas won the election. In the case of Biliran Province in the Eastern Visayas region, experts from the Philippine Computer Society (PhilComSoc) released in December 2011 a report containing their technical assessment of evidence of fraud in that province and said that there was no doubt that electronic hocus-pocus indeed happened there in May 2010. The PhilComSoc experts were able to get their hands on the electronic logs and audit trails of Smartmatic's PCOS voting machines and the canvassing computers of the Municipal Board of Canvassers (MBOC) in Biliran and based their analysis on these. They found: “The audit trail of the MBOC computers showed that it [sic] received the transmission of the election results for a precinct from an internet address. But a few hours later, the same audit trail showed that the MBOC computer received another batch of election results for the SAME precinct from ANOTHER internet address [emphasis theirs]. Seven (7) precincts were observed to have this pattern.” What they said this showed was “that the MBOC computers could receive election results for the SAME precinct from several PCOS machines – with the possibility of bearing different results [emphasis theirs]”. Very clearly, this was a system anomaly of the highest order. What it meant was that the canvassing program did not even include identication protocols to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate election returns. What it meant was that the canvassing computers were not set up to allow one, and only one, PCOS machine per voting center to transmit election results. What it meant was that the canvassing computers were not programmed to recognize the specic PCOS machines from which they should be accepting election results. What it meant was that the canvassing program indiscriminately allowed subsequent transmissions, regardless of where these originated from, to change and overwrite previously transmitted election returns. What it meant was that the canvassing computers added to, subtracted from, or otherwise altered election results initially received from one source (a specic internet address) using inputs received some time later from another source (a different internet address). By any technical standard, this was not only unacceptable, it was patently absurd. It should be pointed out that the canvassing computers should have received only one transmission of election results from a particular voting