Detractors of the ongoing effort to automate the elections in May can criticize all they want but at the end of the day there's nothing they can do anymore at this point to stop the project.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court dismissed with finality a petition to nullify the contract between Comelec and Smartmatic-TIM. Voting 13-2, the court upheld the decision it made September last year.

Here's an excerpt from an inquirer.net report:

(The court said) the Comelec did not commit grave abuse of discretion in awarding the contract to technology provider Smartmatic-TIM.

The high tribunal also found the arguments raised by petitioners H. Harry Roque, Jr. and the Concerned Citizens Movement (CCM) as mostly “rehash.”

Now, that's one less thing for Comelec and Smartmatic-TIM to think about. But there's more, one of which are persistent concerns about the impact of looming brownouts on the implementation of the automated system on election day.

Another issue that seems to have died down but may soon be raised again concerns the source code review. Last I heard, Comelec conducted a review last Wednesday. A friend of mine who works for a major newspaper told me that the Center for People Empowerment in Governance or CenPeg and the Automated Election System Watch or AESWatch were conspicuously absent during the whole thing.

In case you didn't know, CenPeg and AESWatch led the calls for the release of the source code for public scrutiny. It is a big wonder then why both groups simply snubbed the review.

Well, I've been scouring the net for an answer and I found a report from The Daily Tribune. Here's an excerpt.

The software program that will run the automated election’s 82,000 machines will not be trusted by voters unless the Commission on Elections (Comelec) allows a real source code review.

This was the warning issued by he Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG) in response to the poll body’s move to make the software program (source code) of the automated election system (AES) available for review by political parties and interested groups.

Bobby Tuazon, CenPEG’s director for Policy Studies, in a statement, noted that the Comelec’s “source code review” is not for real and the ground rules and restrictions it has set make the activity a sham.

The review, according to Comelec, will be done under “controlled conditions” that are inconsistent with Section 12 of Republic Act 9369 which mandates the poll body for the prompt release of the source code for an independent review by citizens’ groups and parties once an AES technology is selected for implementation.

At best, Comelec will allow only a “walk through” or, worse, a mere “presentation of the results” of the source code review supposedly done by the Colorado-based SysTest labs at a cost of P70 million, Tuazon said.

“This is not the kind of review we have asked for under Section 12 of RA 9369. The review looks just like a ‘walk through’ or worse, what the reviewers will see is just the ‘results’ of the source code review done by SysTest, which is under a different section of RA 9369,” he noted.

Hmm. The hecklers are at it again.