MOCK SUCCESS: The mock polls held last Saturday by the Commission on Elections were “successful” indeed.

They succeeded in confirming what has been suspected all along — that behind its confident front, the Comelec is not yet ready to conduct a credible computerized election nationwide. The exercise demonstrated that:

• Hardware — The second-hand Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines or computers that the Comelec insists on using in the May election are not 99.99-percent error free as advertised.

• Software — It is risky using substitute software when the foreigner-owner of the operating system developed for the May election refuses to lend, lease or sell it to the Comelec or Smartmatic, the poll body’s technical partner.

• Peopleware — The technicians so crucial in preparing, managing and trouble-shooting the PCOS to be set up in 76,000 polling precincts all over the country are not yet up to the job.

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A MOCKERY: The mock polls last Saturday were more of a mockery of the election process than a miniature facsimile thereof.

Yet the Comelec announces plans to hold a repeat of the same mockery. The poll agency appears bent on desensitizing, by repeated exposure, the unwary public into accepting the erratic PCOS system carried over from 2010.

(By buying the old PCOS at an incredible price and using them again, Comelec commissioners have succeeded in [1] making overnight multimillionaires and [2] helping destroy the evidence of poll fraud in 2010. But that is another big story waiting to be told another day.)

Careening toward Election Day 2013, the Comelec better not drag the nation with it on the straight path to the cliff. They should be honest enough to just admit the obvious and fix the flaws of the system.

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SUB SOFTWARE: The major defect of the mock polls was that the demo PCOS did not carry THE SAME software that the machines are to use in the real elections in May.

It was pointless — it was an exercise in futility — to pretend to test the PCOS system without loading the very same software that will run it in May. How could Comelec have tested a missing component that was to be the brain of the system?

Where is that all-important software? When will Smartmatic be able to deliver it for installation into the ageing PCOS?

(For that matter, the “source code” that was to have been used in the questioned 2010 elections is reportedly unaccounted for. I am ready to believe that even the prominent individuals chosen for its safekeeping had never seen, much less understood, it.)

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MUM’S THE WORD: Some of the demo PCOS were able to read some of the ballots some of the time, and sometimes send results to some distant servers. But that is no guarantee that the same machines will work faultlessly when the genuine software is loaded come election time.

Comelec officials sounded pathetic speculating that some of the glitches last Saturday were “probably” due to the PCOS’ prolonged storage, or that their rollers were not aligned, or that maybe the ballots had uneven edges, or that the weather was….

None of them even thought of the possibility that the bogus or substitute software that was used had bugs.

As Comelec officials obviously did not know what they were talking about, they should have just kept quiet and not exposed their ignorance.

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NO PAPER TRAIL: Even with the voluminous data they process and transmit via overloaded telecom wires, the Lotto betting machines of the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office deployed nationwide operate better than the PCOS in the mockery polls.

Look again at the front-page picture of the Philippine STAR last Sunday. Note the Mongol pencil holding the roll of paper running through the machine. Considering the billions being transacted for the PCOS system, such improvisation was pathetic.

Talking of paper, why do they insist on using thermal paper just because that is what favored suppliers have to offer? After the print on thermal paper fades, where is the paper trail that printing is supposed to perpetuate?

Election protests are now difficult to prosecute because of the lack of hard copies of crucial documents. And politicians are now asking which is cheaper: Buying votes at ground level or buying made-to-order hocus-pcos results?

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GRACE PERIOD: There is no way the Philippine National Police can justify its decision to allow operators of jueteng and other forms of illegal gambling to go their merry way until the May elections.

One plausible explanation is that the police have entered into a mutually beneficial modus vivendi with the vice lords. It seems they and their superiors are not ready to turn off the gushing faucet.

Does Director General Alan Purisima, PNP chief, think people are that gullible? He gives as excuse for the hands-off policy his discovery that jueteng operators are hiding behind the legal cover of Small Town Lottery.

The 140,000-strong national police are stymied by such flimsy cobwebs?

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OK WITH ROXAS: The PNP chief deplored a National Police Commission resolution barring policemen from raiding STL outlets without permission of the PCSO and the STL operator affected.

“After the elections, we will focus our campaign against illegal gambling,” Purisima promised. “By that time, the licenses and contracts of STL operators would have expired.”

We are awaiting with bated breath what DILG Secretary Mar Roxas, who supervises the PNP, has to say about the carte blanche granted gambling lords.

Roxas has been unofficially declared as the administration Liberal Party candidate for president in 2016. This early, he will be forced to produce money for local LP candidates.