(Eagle News) — Senate Majority Leader Vicente Sotto on Tuesday called for a Senate investigation into what he said were irregularities in the 2016 elections.
In a privilege speech, Sotto noted for instance, that based on information from an “impeccable source,” election results were transmitted as early as May 8, 2016, or a day before the polls.
“The transmission is being done by IP Address 10.11.5.5 to 0507.ccs.pili2016pinas.net as seen in logs of SRVCNTADNS01 server,” he said.
He said it was later discovered that 0507.ccs.pili2016pinas.net was the Consolidated Canvassing System (CCS) of Libon municipality in Albay province.
Sotto said the early transmission continued until the morning of May 9, still prior to the elections.
Foreign access?
The senator also noted that there appeared to be “foreign access” in the election servers.
He said that on May 8, username “e360sync” did just this.
“Apparently e360 is a server in amazonaws.com which is a cloud computing service located mainly in the United States,” he said,noting that it “looks very similar to a software product of the Philippine election provider ‘Smartmatic.’”
“To conclude the second issue, our election servers were allegedly accessed remotely and information gathered were copied and submitted to a server in the amazon cloud services in the United States,” Sotto said.
He said it was “high time that the proper Senate committee investigate the Automated Election System and subpoena Comelec and Smartmatic to provide the relevant data as regards these allegations.”