AN official of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) said the poll body is ready to resolve all technical problems that may happen on election day on May 9, 2022.
Comelec Commissioner Marlon Casquejo said during the press briefing on the end-to-end demonstration of the Election Day Automated Election System (AES), the contingency resolution have already been passed since January.
He said that this was included in the training of electoral boards if ever a problem may arise, that there is the Comelec Election Monitoring Action Center and National Technical Support.
Casquejo added that if there will be technical issues, there is a technical support staff well trained to troubleshoot the system of the Vote Counting Machines or VCMs..
He said included in the contingency measures is the placement of contingency VCMs if in case the AES problems won’t be resolved.
Casquejo added that the end-to-end Election Day AES demonstration is important in order to establish transparency of the election process, from the polling precinct up to the National Board of Canvassers.
“If you notice, if we relate this to the hacking incident, our VCM is a stand-alone at the time of voting. So there is no way that anyone using any device or hacking knowledge to insert any results in the VCM,” Casquejo said in reply to a question on how the end-to-end demonstration will erase fears of hacking or security breach.
The demonstration was witnessed by various stakeholders such as representatives from political parties, election watchdogs, and members of the media, among others.
“The VCM transmit results in split second, or let us say 10 to 20 seconds, it will transmit results to the transparency server, data server, and backup. So, there’s no way a hacker can manipulate the results during that period of seconds,” he added.