158 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy, Second Edition Smartmatic [emphasis theirs]. They also said that Smartmatic “should be penalized accordingly” for the shortfalls with respect to its guarantees including the failure to provide “100% transmission” and the “time stamp issue.” These, they said, gave voters valid reasons “to doubt the system”. A new CAC of technical experts concurred in this matter with its predecessor, saying in a formal resolution dated February 8, 2012, that the option to purchase “should not be exercised” since this “prevents the Comelec from taking advantage of the best possible and less expensive technology currently available”. Clearly these technical experts knew that better and cheaper alternatives are very much available. The CAC also pointed out that exercising the Smartmatic option “will prevent other prospective vendors from participating competitively in the bidding process”. Was avoiding competitive bidding and closing the door on any other technology provider the objective of the Comelec decision? It would certainly appear that Smartmatic was held in such favor as a supplier that ve Comelec commissioners seemed to be no more than its head-bobbing puppets. Strangely, the Smartmatic-favoring commissioners – lawyers, not IT experts – just ignored the recommendations of more technologically knowledgeable people and simply forced through their own wishes. The two Comelec commissioners who strongly opposed the decision were local IT industry pioneer Augusto Lagman (the only IT expert in the Comelec Board) and new appointee Christian Lim (who later went over to the Smartmatic side). Interestingly, the Comelec's own staff of computer programmers – on the initiative of Lagman – with the assistance of additional technical personnel from the Department of Science and Technology in fact already produced a working consolidation and canvassing system, the back-end software application that Smartmatic would have billed the Filipino people for P58 million . The project cost the Comelec a mere P600,000. Lagman says that this system can be the same one used at the city/municipality, provincial, and national levels “no matter what technology is procured and used to count the votes at the precinct level”. Strangely (or maybe not so strangely), the country's political leaders – in both the executive and legislative branches of government (including President Benigno Aquino III who was probably the main beneciary of the 2010 election hocus-pocus) – appeared content to let Comelec and Smartmatic play out this conspiracy to institutionalize the automated swindling of the Filipino voter. It needs to be emphasized that the insidious Smartmatic takeover of the country's electoral processes would put a shadowy foreign group in complete control of Philippine elections. This group would be able to easily manipulate poll results and can effectively decide who will be the winners and who will be the losers in all elections that use this automated system. Dagdag-bawas [addsubtract], done electronically, will be child's play. More importantly, the conspiracy required to rig elections need no longer be large – as it was in