156 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy, Second Edition Smartmatic system “failed to comply with RAs [Republic Acts] 8436, 8792, and 9369 together with its obligations as contracted based on the Terms of Reference of the 2009 Request for Proposal”. PhilComSoc insisted that this would be their position even if “the recommendations to improve on the technical issues reported by its Technical Evaluation Committee, SysTest Labs, and the 2010 National and Local Election Project Management Ofce Technical Working Group” were to be considered. Ateneo University and U.P. computer science professor Dr. Pablo Manalastas listed the “many errors that had to be xed, in order to make the Smartmatic system compliant with the provisions of RA 9369 and Comelec's Terms of Reference”. These included extensive rewrites of software code to “incorporate proper digital signing hardware… support Voter Veried Video Audit Trail on the LCD screen… (and) x the hundreds of bugs in database access, memory allocation and deallocation, proper use of data types, etc. (as reported in the SysTest Labs certication report)”. That meant a lot of xing. Dr. Manalastas said that the review and subsequent reprogramming might take one-and-a-half to two years. He pointedly added, “Smartmatic should really stop pretending that it is an expert in election systems integration (for national elections) because the May 2010 experience proves that it is not.” The obviousness with which Brillantes was setting up the continued use of the Smartmatic system appeared the logical continuation of the plan that began when Comelec rst tailored the original bidding specications to favor Smartmatic. As local IT guru Manuel Alcuaz Jr. then took pains to point out, Comelec introduced some pretty unusual specications to make sure that Smartmatic would win the automation bid. For example, said Alcuaz, Comelec required that the voting machines to be offered should have been “used in an election with at least 40 million voters” because it knew that “there are no elections with 40 million voters in India, Europe, the US, and Japan” and that Smartmatic would alone qualify because it happened to have done an election in Brazil with 40 million voters. For another, Comelec specied that the machine offered should have been in use for four years, a specication that “eliminated many vendors that could offer newer, better, and cheaper machines”. Then, Comelec specied that the machine must be EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] certied which caused Alcuaz to wonder, “Why would this be necessary for a machine that is to be used for 12 hours every three years?” Finally, Comelec specied a 99.9995% accuracy which, Alcuaz pointed out, “eliminated most honest vendors, since that is impossible to achieve in a fair test”. Smartmatic itself could NEVER demonstrate that its system could pass that accuracy standard. Noteworthily, former Comelec IT director Ernie Del Rosario, an ICT [Information and Communications Technology] professional with extensive experience in large-scale system integration, resigned when the Comelec rst decided to award the automation contract to what he considered an “unqualied” Smartmatic. Smartmatic owned neither the hardware nor the