In Nevada:
“The Defendants conspired with each other and with Dominion to cover up the malfunction by ... knowingly causing the Clerk to submit a false report.
“The objective of this conspiracy was ultimately to allow this company to keep its profitable contracts across the State of Nevada intact and to keep its product defect(s) away from the public eye. Defendants’ other objective ... was to defraud the voters of Mineral County, the voters of the State, and the Nevada Supreme Court....”Nepper decried the implications:
“The Defendants are charged with the public trust to protect Nevada’s citizenry from false and/or fraudulent election results. They breached this trust. They instead sought to protect the lucrative contracts of Dominion by sweeping the dereliction under the carpet.”
In the Philippines:
In 2013 the PCOS failed to transmit and canvass 23 percent of the precinct results. Had the count been finished, the senatorial votes would have reached 58 million — more than the 55 million registered voters and the 65-percent turnout of 35.75 million voters. The Comelec doctored its website to hide it.
The senatorial count went 60-30-10-percent for administration-opposition-independent candidates in all precincts, districts, provinces, and regions. The trend defied traditional voting patterns, like Metro Manila going pro-opposition; or cultural biases, like Christians leading in the Muslim Autonomous Region.
The Comelec has ignored all those findings. Congress has kept fearfully silent.
PCOS maker sued for US poll fraud
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| Groups under KPMM march to Mendiola to condemn alleged fraud in the 2013 election. (Macky Macaspac) |
Not only Philippine elections does the PCOS (precinct count optical scanners) cheat, but also America’s.
There’s a big difference, though. In the US the PCOS maker and the election officials who used it are sued. In the Philippines, they laugh their way to the banks.
The maker of the PCOS is Dominion Election Systems of Canada. The Venezuelan Smartmatic Corp. that sells the vote-counting machines to the Philippines is merely its dealer outside the US.
This month Dominion was sued in Nevada for election fraud. The case concerns the PCOS’ non-counting of some votes in Mineral County in the Nov. 2014 election. (Seehttp://media.graytvinc.com/documents/mineral-county-lawsuit.pdf)
The entire state of Nevada was likely cheated. So, no less than Nevada’s Secretary of State and Attorney General were impleaded for conspiracy.
The debacle puts in question the reliability of the PCOS. News reports point up the possible compromise of the entire Nevada election results, as well as in other US states that still use the PCOS. (Seehttp://www.kolotv.com/home/headlines/Mineral-County-Election-Lawsuit-Vot...)
It turned out that there were 178 more votes cast for Mineral County clerk than were counted by the PCOS in Nov. 2014. The missing votes have been traced to one machine used in early balloting. It is yet uncertain how many other PCOS units miscounted votes.
When the discrepancy was discovered, Nevada’s Secretary of State ordered the outgoing county clerk to “correct” the voter turnout report. That is, ignore the uncounted votes, and record only what were tallied. The Secretary of State and Attorney General then certified the false figures to the state Supreme Court.
“They got certified as the voting results when everybody knew they were falsified,” Reno lawyer Ken McKenna was quoted in news items. He filed the lawsuit on behalf of Chris Nepper, who lost the race for county clerk by a margin within those 178 votes.
“That’s voter fraud,” McKenna said. “Was that for their own self interest, to assure the public? Was that for the benefit of the company (Dominion) so they don’t lose their contract? Why would you intentionally certify records that you know are the results of a malfunctioning machine?”
Dominion’s machines were used statewide. The Nevada Secretary of State also certified the PCOS units. So the issues raised in Mineral County, McKenna said, concern every Nevada voter. “We have no way to believe that it won’t happen again. We don’t know if it’s happened in other counties and just hasn’t been caught. We don’t know what the reliability of these machines is now. They are highly in question.”
Dominion declined to answer US press queries.
Nepper complained: “The error in the recording of votes was caused by malfunction of voting machines provided by Defendant Dominion, under contract with the State and/or County to provide such hardware and software to the County Clerk to enable the electronic results in each county to be accurately recorded. Defendant Secretary of State certified those machines for use by Mineral County. There were other vote count discrepancies in other counties, which were also the result of defective voting machines.”
He went on: “The Defendants conspired with each other and with Dominion to cover up the malfunction by ... knowingly causing the Clerk to submit a false report.
“The objective of this conspiracy was ultimately to allow this company to keep its profitable contracts across the State of Nevada intact and to keep its product defect(s) away from the public eye. Defendants’ other objective ... was to defraud the voters of Mineral County, the voters of the State, and the Nevada Supreme Court....”
Nepper decried the implications: “The Defendants are charged with the public trust to protect Nevada’s citizenry from false and/or fraudulent election results. They breached this trust. They instead sought to protect the lucrative contracts of Dominion by sweeping the dereliction under the carpet.”
There’s a twist to the story. The winner in the Mineral County clerk election resigned, and Nepper was appointed to the job.
He already had filed the complaint by then. Still, he is pressing on. Finding the answers is, for him, important in restoring faith in the voting system. It will be his job to oversee that system in the next election.
In the Philippines the PCOS consistently has failed the elections. In 2010 a random manual audit showed the system was only 99.6-percent accurate. That was way below the 99.995 percent required by the Election Automation Act of 2008. It meant hundreds of thousands of uncounted and miscounted ballots.
In 2013 the PCOS failed to transmit and canvass 23 percent of the precinct results. Had the count been finished, the senatorial votes would have reached 58 million — more than the 55 million registered voters and the 65-percent turnout of 35.75 million voters. The Comelec doctored its website to hide it.
The senatorial count went 60-30-10-percent for administration-opposition-independent candidates in all precincts, districts, provinces, and regions. The trend defied traditional voting patterns, like Metro Manila going pro-opposition; or cultural biases, like Christians leading in the Muslim Autonomous Region.
The Comelec has ignored all those findings. Congress has kept fearfully silent.
Over P16 billion has been spent so far to purchase, accessorize, and warehouse 82,000 PCOS units. That makes the Philippines the world’s biggest spender on (unreliable) election automation.
The machines bought in 2009 were used only twice, in 2010 and 2013. Yet they will now be junked.
Instead, the Comelec will purchase and accessorize 94,000 new PCOS units for the 2016 election. This will cost another P14.5 billion. Warehousing will be another P400 million a year.
Dominion’s agent Smartmatic has been accused of breaking election and bidding laws, yet keeps cornering the contracts. The Ombudsman has not deigned to investigate.
