By Ba Ipe
Rio is known as the expert, who is instrumental in the modernization of the telecommunications facilities of the Armed Forces of the Philippines before his retirement in the military service. Marcos is the son of the dictator, who was toppled in the 1986 peaceful revolution. Duterte is the daughter of the immediate past Philippine president. She was the mayor for six years (2010-2016) of the southern port city of Davao City, where the Dutertes have hailed. Rio is not part of the democratic opposition establishment.
It is ironical that the democratic opposition led by the Liberal Party candidate Leni Robredo and running mate Francis Pangilinan were oblivious of what Rio claimed were machinations to rig the election results. All those claims of rigging the election results went public nine months after the conclusion of the May 9, 2022 presidential elections. A few days after the elections, Robredo went to New York City with her children purportedly “to take a rest from the gruelling campaign.” She was reported to have taken selfie shots with her kids, as they promenaded in the Central Park in NYC.
She left everything to her political allies and did not in any way issue any statement that would claim election cheating. According to one of her lawyers, Robredo went to the extent of conceding the elections results, admitting that proof showed that Marcos cheated. Duterte and Robredo belonged to opposing political alliances but under the election rules in the Philippines, the winning presidential and vice presidential bets could belong to opposing camps.
Prior to the elections, Robredo gained widespread popularity in her native country mainly for her community projects. As the vice president of Rodrigo Duterte, Robredo did not support the erstwhile president, who was widely perceived a madman and murderer of his own people. Robredo opposed the bloody but failed Duterte’s war on drugs, which killed between 15,000 to 30,000 people. Duterte now faces charges of crimes against humanity before the International Criminal Court for his failed drug war.
Robredo has a reputation for an excellent community worker for a number of projects that seek to alleviate hardship in her poverty stricken country. But this could be her own undoing. She is not perceived to be keen on political strategy, which countering election cheating. She landed a poor second to Marcos with a vote difference of over fifteen million.
Rio is not identified with the democratic opposition. He started alone in claiming in a series of social media posts since early this year that the votes of Marcos and Robredo in the last elections were” statiscally impossible.” Until now, the political opposition has not picked up Rio’s claims, although a number of democratic activists have joined Rio and his group.
Rio, a former secretary of the Department of Information and Communications Technology, a newly created office in the Rodrigo Duterte government, raised questions that defied answers to claims that the elections were rigged. For instance, Rio cited as one of the pieces of evidence of his claim that no less than watchdog Commission on Elections, or Comelec, had admitted that the 20,300 voting counting machines modems, or VCMs transmitted their election returns, or ERs, using a single Internet Protocol (IP) Address 192.168.0.2. This was regarded inconceivable, according to Rio, because each VCM moden was asigned a single IP address.
Rio said Comelec admitted all these ERs were transmitted by a single telecommunications firm. At least three telco firms operate nationwide in the Philippines – the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company (PLDT) Group, Globe Telecom Inc. Group, and the Dito Telecommunity. These VCM modems, Rio said citing Comelec’s admission its official website, were distributed in Metro Manila and adjacent areas. Rio did not identify the telco firm that transmitted the ERs.
According to Rio, each VCM modem used any of the transmission cards of three telcos – PLDT, Globe, and Dito - so that the public schoolteachers, who manned the Electoral Board, could select the telco with the strongest signal in the voting precinct’s area. Assuming the three telcos had the same signal strength in Metro Manila and adjacent areas, the chance of each telco for being selected for transmission would be about equal, with a slight advantage for Globe and PLDT for being the dominant players in these areas.
According to Rio citing Comelec data in its website, Globe and PLDT never used the IP Address 192.168.0.2. What the official records showed, according to Rio’s revelations, was the use of the IP Address 192.168.0.2, and the telco/Internet service provider (ISP) that provided it, in 98.94% in all voting precincts in Metro Manila, 95.5% in the adjacent province of Cavite and 81.4% in the nearby province of Batangas.
Official Comelec records, according to Rio, also showed that the IP Address 192.168.0.2 was used by 51% of the unbelievable 39,512 VCM modems that transmitted in the first hour as shown the public by the Transparency Server on 8:02pm of May 9, 2022. In that first hour, for all intents and purposes, the winners for President and VP were already established. That first hour also fixed a constant vote ratio among all presidential and vice presidential candidates that never changed during the period of counting,” according to Rio.
According to Rio, the Church-based private watchdog Parish Pastoral Council for Resposible Voting (PPCRV) tried to justify the constant vote ratio by using the law of large numbers. “But what large numbers are they talking about when only one IP Address was predominantly used? Rio mused. “That would be equivalent as to having a loaded dice.”
According to Rio, the first hour also showed what he regarded an uncanny ratio of actual voters to registered voters that are the same in many provinces and hardly changed in the second hour. COMELEC and its private watchdogs, PPCRV and National Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL) could not explain why and how this private IP Address 192.168.0.2 was used predominantly, yet it tried try to treat this phenomenon as just “a normal thing.”
They seemed to have forgotten, according to Rio, that modems are assigned IP addresses not by chance but by the telcos/ISPs and the administrator of the private network. Yet no one could explain why and how IP Address 192.168.0.2 had been used 20,300 times in a Private Network that has more than 17 million IP Addresses available to it.
“Actually the explanation may be quite simple. The 2022 Elections were rigged,” Rio said.
Rio’s claims have been circulating non-stop as Comelec officials could hardly answer tham. But they were not given much chance to succeed to disturb Marcos and Duterte from their current political posts. The reluctant of the political opposition to support Rio is another object of concern. Robredo has yet to give her approval to what is being raised. But certain democratic quarters have claimed that Robredo’s involvement is immaterial. She is past tense, they have claimed. 30
PHILIP M. Lustre Jr. is a journalist for more than four decates. He writes commentaries and feature articles on various topics in politics, economy, and social issues. He also writes books.
