RP poll automation faces risks: IT experts
by Manny Mogato, Reuters | 09/11/2009 9:02 PM
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Vulnerable to hacking, power outages, physical threats
MANILA - Automated elections in the Philippines next year could fail due to potential threats from hackers and other technical vulnerabilities, officials and information technology experts said on Friday.
The Philippines, seeking to overhaul an election process in which winners are declared months after the actual vote and allegations of fraud abound, will introduce a poll automation system that has never been tested anywhere in the world.
"It's vulnerable to attacks," Virtus Gil, a retired general and head of the government's cybersecurity agency, told Reuters, though he said there was no fool-proof electronic voting system in the world.
He urged the elections body to heed warnings from experts and assure the public that safety guarantees were available to protect the integrity of the polls.
"Electronic voting also increases the potential for large-scale fraud," Gil added.
On Thursday, the country's Supreme Court voted to uphold the $150 million deal between the Commission on Elections and a Barbados-based company to supply 82,200 machines to speed up counting of votes and minimise possible fraud.
Midas Marquez, court spokesman, said the court denied a petition to nullify the contract because the voting machine supplier met the minimum demands of the poll automation law.
Dante Mara, an expert who designs computer security systems, said power outages, hacking, overloading and physical threats could disrupt the whole process from the counting to the tallying and transmission of vote results.
"This early, approximately 3,800 to 4,200 precincts cannot be covered by the automated election system," Mara told reporters, saying these voting centres -- about 5 percent of the total number of precincts -- were inaccessible due to rugged terrain and lacked power.
Jose Tolentino, executive director of the poll agency, said the agency has to strengthen its security protocols, using a 128-bit encryption system to make hacking difficult.
"You will need 1 trillion combinations before you can grab the data we are transmitting," Tolentino said.
Lawmakers, political groups and analysts fear chaos from automated polls due to potential machine breakdowns and delays in result transmission, which could lead to a failed election and political limbo.
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