Commentary
Philippine Daily Inquirer
By Felicito C. Payumo
March 16, 2010

FULL OR PARTIAL AUTOMATION OF 2010 ELECTIONS?

There is little argument that our system of electing our public officials has to be automated. What drove home this point to us were the recently concluded elections that were conducted, not in the U.S., but in India. We have been used to watching elections in the U.S. concluded speedily. But India, with its more than one billion people, was also able to show the world that it could determine the winners in the last elections in a matter of days.
The Philippines, with its less than 90 million people, should be able to do the same. But the question is: do we completely abandon an admittedly medieval system and jump into full automation and nationwide implementation by adopting the DRE or OMR systems? DRE (Direct Recording Electronic System) is a touch-screen method of voting with instantaneous tally of votes. Since this would require 1 to 3 DRE machines for every one of the 250,000 precincts, a total of 250,000 up to 750,000 units may be required at a cost of up to P20 Billion. The OMR (Optical Mark Reader) or the PCOS (Precinct Count Optical Scan) requires shading of machine readable ballots at the polling place which are then scanned and counted by machines located either at the precinct or municipal level. If the ballots are brought to a central counting center in the Municipal Hall after the closing of the polls, then no precinct results will be available until election returns are printed and electronically transmitted from the counting center. This makes the transport stage very crucial and dangerous, according to Atty. Luie Tito Guia of the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES). But even if nothing happens during the transporting, would the voters accept the results? What if their expectations were different? Gus Lagman of TransparentElections.org likens it to an Ateneo-De La Salle basketball game with no running score being shown. When the buzzer signals the end of the game, the electronic score board flashes the final score : Ateneo 100 –De La Salle 99. “What do you think will happen?” he asks. “Pandemonium,” we answered!
The alternative is to locate the counting centers at every barangay school polling centers, which requires deploying 45,000 counting machines. Still, the voters will not be able to observe the tallying process. Transparency, or the lack of it, spells the difference for voter acceptance.
The TransparentElections.org, on the other hand, favors the Open Election System (OES) that retains the manual system of voting, counting and preparation of the election returns (ERs) at the precinct level and which, therefore, requires no voter training. Voters do not want to drop their ballots into a black hole; they want them read in their presence. The reading and counting of votes during elections are events they look forward to. But what will be automated are the canvassing and consolidation of ERs from the Municipal to the National level. The encoding of the ERs and posting to the Web to make them accessible to the public will require buying only PCs and Servers at P2Billion- already included in the total cost of P4 Billion for the OES. By comparison, the approved budget for the OMR is P11.3 Billion. The PCs and Servers may also be donated to the schools, unlike the DRE or OMR machines which will have to be stored.
But are we not sacrificing speed by not automating the voting and counting process? Yes, but not much. Manual tallying which happens simultaneously throughout the country at precinct level takes only 5 to 12 hours at most. It is the manual canvassing and consolidating of the ERs from the municipal/city, provincial and national level that takes 25 to 40 days. It is ludicrous to spend an inordinate amount of money (P7.3 Billion) to squeeze a few hours of time spent for voting and counting which represents only 2.5 per cent of the total election process; a highly disproportionate allocation of resource and effort especially when done at the expense of an indispensable element for voters’ acceptance- transparency. Where it makes sense to automate is the canvassing and consolidation of the ERs where wholesale cheating can occur. TransparentElections.org reported instances of tampered ERs, e.g. 1 changed to 4, 3 to 8, and a number added before or after the digits. Former COMELEC Chairman Chris Monsod fears that a sudden leap from a completely manual system to full automation starting at precinct level may put the integrity of the system at risk. A few specialists hold the key to the software of these specialized machines. Would we want the results of elections to depend, not on the people who vote, but on the people who count the votes? These operators find the picture of nuns hugging the ballot boxes laughable. “They can hold on to them for as long as they want because we are not going to snatch them.” They’ve already done their wholesale stealing in the Election Returns.
There is, of course, the issue of whether the Law (RA 9369) allows partial automation. While the intent is to automate all phases of election, the IFES points to the Law’s statement of policy which declares that the State should recognize COMELEC’s mandate and authority to prescribe the adoption and use of the most suitable technology of demonstrated capability taking into account the situation prevailing in the area. It can well mean that based on its assessment of what the suitable technology is, it can decide to implement automation partially.
The question is: How will the COMELEC decide? It is disturbing to hear that the Advisory Council has not recommended the inclusion of the OES because it has not been tried and demonstrated in a previous election and it has yet to be certified by a certifying body. Observers found this reasoning absurd. We have been using manual voting and counting in all past elections, while the encoding of ERs using PCs and Servers and their uploading to the Web is no rocket science which any computer literate student can do. What then is the real reason?


F.C. Payumo was a three- term Representative of the Ist District of Bataan and a former Chairman and Administrator of the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority. He is currently Chairman of the University of Nueva Caceres.