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KWEBA ni BAROK

No Transparency Server, No Problem: The iOne Playbook for Winning Elections Without Winning Trust

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Louis ‘Barok’ Biraogo

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98.12% transmission speed, 0% independent audit: The math doesn’t add up

By Louis ‘Barok‘ C. Biraogo — October 31, 2026

BEFORE we wade into this swamp, let’s establish one thing: The Philippine Star story that landed on my desk—helpfully labeled “With iOne Resources Inc.” at the top, because nothing says “independent journalism” like a sponsored content disclaimer—isn’t a news report.

It’s a press release wearing a journalist’s trench coat, complete with the “college buddies” human-interest hook that Kweba ni Barok readers have learned to recognize as the opening chord of a procurement horror story.

“So… Who Won? (Asking for 110 Million Friends)”

The “Breakthrough” That Wasn’t

Here’s what iOne and its joint-venture partner Ardent Networks want you to believe: They swooped in after Smartmatic’s disqualification, deployed 8,700 Starlink “satellites” (more on that linguistic sleight-of-hand later), and delivered election results at unprecedented speed.

The Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV), bless its taxpayer-funded heart, dutifully parroted the talking points: “incredibly fast,” “broken all past records.”

And you know what? The transmission was fast. PPCRV’s own data showed 98.12% of returns received within 67 hours. That’s genuinely impressive for an archipelago where some precincts are accessible only by banca or carabao.

But here’s the thing about speed: A bullet train and a suicide bomber both arrive quickly. Speed tells you nothing about what’s inside the package.

The Bidding Was a Two-Horse Race Rigged by a Supreme Court Decision

Let’s talk about how we got here. The 2025 Secure Electronic Transmission Services (SETS) procurement wasn’t a competitive bidding process. It was a duopoly cosplay.

Only two joint ventures submitted bids: iOne-Ardent and the eBizolution-Secur Links-Systems Information consortium. That’s not competition. That’s a tennis match where both players are wearing the same sponsor’s logo.

Why only two bidders? Because Smartmatic—the company that had run Philippine automated elections since 2010—was disqualified by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) in November 2023 over bribery allegations connected to the 2016 polls.

That disqualification was later reversed by the Supreme Court, which found that Comelec committed “grave abuse of discretion” by implementing “a discretionary pre-qualification regime antithetical to the very essence of the Government Procurement Reform Act (GPRA)”.

Read that again. The Supreme Court of the Philippines said the procurement environment from which iOne emerged was tainted by grave abuse of discretion. And iOne’s defense is… “We won fair and square”?

The SC’s remedy was prospective, meaning the Smartmatic reversal didn’t disrupt the 2025 contracts. But the legal cloud didn’t evaporate just because the Court prioritized election logistics over procurement integrity.

The “8,700 Satellites” Are Terminals, Not Satellites—And That Matters

Here’s where iOne’s marketing machine reveals its contempt for basic physics. The company’s chief technology officer (CTO), Larry dela Cruz, and the PhilStar report describe “8,700 Starlink low earth orbit satellites” deployed across the Philippines.

This is nonsense. iOne deployed 8,700 Starlink user terminals—the pizza-box-sized dishes you see bolted to roofs. SpaceX owns the actual satellite constellation.

Why does this matter? Because it obscures the real dependency: Every single one of those terminals connects to infrastructure owned and controlled by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, a company with Pentagon contracts, a mercurial CEO who has demonstrated willingness to weaponize service access (see: Ukraine), and zero accountability to Philippine regulators.

iOne didn’t build a transmission network. It rented access to someone else’s.

The Transparency Server That Vanished

Remember when Comelec Chair George Garcia said, “Sa darating na election wala na po tayong transparency server… kasi doon po nagkakaproblema”? The transparency server—the mechanism that allowed watchdogs and media to independently monitor results—was eliminated. In its place, results went directly to multiple entities.

How did that work out?

PPCRV’s own press statement from May 13, 2025, reads like a masterclass in bureaucratic hedging: “unexpected technical issues,” “different file formats,” “discrepancies between our internal count and publicly reported figures,” and—the kicker—”COMELEC’s dashboard shows around 98.75% transmission, the results file PPCRV received only accounts for 79.9% of election returns.”

Nineteen percentage points. That’s not a “discrepancy.” That’s a chasm.

And Comelec’s explanation? Garcia said it was like a group message where “one person might receive it instantly, while another might get it a few seconds later”. A few seconds? The gap persisted long enough for PPCRV to issue a public statement and for Kontra Daya to demand explanations.

Kontra Daya’s Danilo Arao didn’t buy the group-chat analogy either: “If you’re talking about relatively almost the same level of technology, it wouldn’t take hours, especially if it is a transmission, the worst would be a 10 minute delay”.

The Davao House Full of Starlink Equipment

In April 2025, police found Starlink devices, solar panels, and batteries stored in a private residence in Davao City. Not a Comelec warehouse. A house. Somebody’s house.

Comelec’s response was a masterpiece of bureaucratic jiu-jitsu: They acknowledged the equipment was legitimately iOne’s, said it was a “staging hub,” and then—because even they realized how bad this looked—ordered the equipment moved to official Comelec offices under police guard.

Let me translate: The company responsible for transmitting the votes of millions of Filipinos had equipment sitting in a residential neighborhood with, by Comelec’s own admission, no election software capable of altering counts. The equipment was “for transmission only.” Which is like saying the getaway car is “for transportation only” and has nothing to do with the bank robbery.

The Accountability Void

Here’s the fundamental problem: We have no independent, forensic audit of iOne’s system. We have PPCRV saying “fast.” We have Comelec saying “no irregularities.” We have iOne saying “we’re awesome.”

What we don’t have is:

  • A published independent penetration test
  • Full disclosure of the Starlink/SpaceX contractual terms
  • Clarity on where election data was processed and who held encryption keys
  • An explanation for why only two bidders qualified
  • A chain-of-custody audit for those 8,700 terminals

The Supreme Court, in the Smartmatic decision, articulated the principle that should govern this entire affair: “The COMELEC’s choice of supplier… is a matter of significant public interest, as the integrity, freedom, and fairness of automated elections depend largely on the Automated Election System (AES) to be utilized”.

Apply that standard to iOne. Does the public have the information necessary to evaluate whether this choice served the integrity of the elections? No.

The Bottom Line

iOne Resources and Ardent Networks may well have delivered a functional transmission system. The speed data supports that. But “functional” is not “trustworthy,” and “fast” is not “secure.”

What we have is a company with its first-ever national-scale contract, operating in a procurement environment that the Supreme Court itself said was tainted by grave abuse of discretion, deploying foreign-controlled infrastructure with no published security audits, storing equipment in private homes, and benefiting from the elimination of the very transparency mechanism that was designed to catch problems.

The PhilStar piece ends with iOne’s CTO saying the project “helps redefine what reliable internet access means for all Filipinos”. Cute. But this wasn’t an internet access project. It was the nervous system of Philippine democracy.

And right now, we’re being asked to trust that nervous system based on nothing more than a sponsored content article and the assurances of the very people who profited from it.

In the legal profession, we have a saying: “When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. When the law is on your side, pound the law. When neither is on your side, pound the table.”

iOne is pounding the table. The question is whether anyone will bother to check what’s underneath.

Key Citations

A. Legal & Official Sources

B. News Articles

C. Official Websites

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