Election software system now with Comelec

THE electoral software system which will be used in national and local elections next year is now in the possession of the Electoral Commission (Comelec).

Commissioner Marlon Helmetjo, Chairman of the Steering Committee, handed over the executable file of the Election Management System (EMS) to Comelec en banc on Wednesday before it was placed in a safe at Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) as required by the law of the Republic (RA) 98369 or the “automated electoral law”.

Helmetjo has provided Comelec with the source code and the final trusted version that will run the entire automated electoral system (AES).

Helmetjo traveled to Huntsville, Ala., To personally witness the source code review conducted by Pro V&V last week, which was also broadcast live at the Comelec office in the presence of electoral actors including representatives. political parties and election observers.

The EMS designs the configuration of the vote counting machines, such as the number of constituencies and the number of voters per constituency, among others.

Helmetjo said examination of the source code showed that the code met all criteria.

He added that the trusted version will be shared with local source code reviewers, subject to Comelec policy, as provided in RA 9639.

The body of the survey defines trust building as “the process by which source code is converted into machine-readable binary instructions (executable code) for the computer. It is done with adequate security measures in place to ensure that the executable code is verifiable code and a faithful representation of the source code. “

Source code, on the other hand, is the human-readable version of the software. This is a custom voting software for the Philippine elections that will be installed in the vote counting machines (VCM).

The source code is basically an independent auditor to make sure the system is running without possible malicious lines. It is supplied by Smartmatic, the supplier of VCMs.