Elections as an instrument of political control 179 Additionally, the petitioners argued that “The Philippines violated the authors' right to the free expression of their will as electors during the 10 May 2010 automated elections, and continues to violate such right in its conduct of the 13 May 2013 automated elections – since there was no review of the source codes used for the 10 May 2010 elections.” Such a source code review is mandated by Section 14 of Republic Act 8436 (as amended by R.A. 9369), to wit: “Once an AES technology is selected for implementation, the Commission shall promptly make the source code of that technology available and open to any interested political party or groups which may conduct their own review thereof.” The petitioners argued that, “The framers of Republic Act 9369, the Amended Automated Election System (AES) Law, realizing that the process of computerized counting of vote marks on paper ballots will be done in secret by the computer, provided an alternative that may be acceptable as a substitute to public counting – source code review. If the source code of the program running on the PCOS computer can be reviewed by the community, then we will know how our vote marks are interpreted, how votes are assigned to the selected candidates, how votes are tallied, what data are saved for back up later, how the precinct ER EML le is generated, how it is digitally signed by the BEI, how the transmission to the municipal canvassing computer and other destinations is carried out, what details are placed in the audit logs and whether these details are sufcient, etc. With source code review conducted by people we trust, the computerized counting of votes, although carried out in secret by the PCOS computer, will be revealed to us, and so we can accept computerized counting as if it were public counting…. Nevertheless, the COMELEC failed to have the source codes used by Smartmatic during the 10 May 2010 elections reviewed.” At its core, this was a complaint that the Filipino voter's fundamental human rights had been violated because an imperious Commission on Elections disabled mechanisms that would have allowed public access to the vote count and would have permitted the Filipino public to verify the accuracy and integrity of the election results reported in 2010 and 2013. It was a demand for transparency in the whole automated election process. A crucial lack of transparency was why several developed countries – notably, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Switzerland – as well as several states in the US had reverted back from electronic polls to manual polls. On March 3, 2009, for example, the Federal Constitutional Court of the Federal Republic of Germany ruled that the use of voting machines must “meet the constitutional requirements of the principle of the public nature of elections.” The principal basis for this ruling was that “all essential steps of an election… (must be) subject to the possibility of public scrutiny.” In essence, that German court was saying that TRANSPARENCY is absolutely indispensable in a democratic election. The German court further stated that, in using electronic voting machines, the “verication of the result must be possible by the citizen reliably and without any specialist knowledge of the subject [emphasis mine]”. That certainly wasn't the case in the 2010 and 2013 poll exercises. Nor in the 2016 poll exercise.