Elections as an instrument of political control 159 manual dagdag-bawas – but would only need to involve a handful of strategically positioned individuals and one knowledgeable computer programmer. These individuals – and their foreign masters – would then have in their hands the sole power to determine the country's future via the selection of its political leaders. A media blitzkrieg was one major front in the battle for control of Philippine elections. It was not a big secret in media circles that Smartmatic was offering “grants” to certain columnists and journalists for “research” into whatever they wanted. This media effort was ratcheted up several notches in March 2011. As if in sync, several columnists with little knowledge of computer technology seemed to be plagiarizing each other when they wrote curiously similar pieces wherein they offered opinions that contradicted computer science professors and information technology experts who had issued detailed reports and public statements criticizing the Smartmatic system as awed, faulty, and unsecure. As previously mentioned, the voting machine software Smartmatic used for its PCOS machines actually belonged to Dominion Voting Systems, a Coloradobased company that bragged, in its own press release, that it “provided the ImageCast precinct count optical scan (PCOS) technology that played a key role in the Philippines' historic success” in the May 2010 Philippine elections. This company, Dominion, later acquired Sequoia Voting Systems and the security rm Diebold's e-voting unit, which made it the second largest voting machine company in the US. Not incidentally, both Sequoia and Diebold have had questions raised in the US about the integrity and security of their electronic voting systems. So, it was not as if the aws of the Dominion system supplied by Smartmatic emerged only in the May 2010 Philippine elections. New York State, for example, also had problems with Dominion/Sequoia electronic voting systems. In elections in November 2009, a virus was reported to have infected the computerized voting machines in some counties “casting doubts on the accuracy of the counts retrieved”. Election ofcials were reported to have noted that “(t)he ImageCast machines have one more signicant and scary aw: USB ports. USB ports allow various devices to be attached to a computer in order to input information, connect a device, add wireless network capability and so on. Wireless network devices and USB storage devices can (and are) made small enough to t into a regular wristwatch or bracelet. Through either type of device, software hacks or remote control of the voting machine could be implemented or a virus introduced… (adjusting) election counts with the County or State Boards of Election none the wiser.” Those USB ports were similar to the console ports found on the PCOS machines Smartmatic provided for the May 2010 elections here. Local IT security experts complained about these as a security no-no and clearly “non-specication”. As cited by an election watchdog group in the US, BlackBoxVoting.org, Rice