|
AUTOMATING our elections—using computers and methods that work for
credit cards and banking transactions—will do two great things.
One, it will make it harder to cheat and coerce teacher-inspectors.
Two, it will restore the faith of a great portion of our
citizenry—maybe even an overwhelming majority—in the integrity
of our election process.
That would then make us feel again that our
beloved Republic is after all an electoral democracy—not an ugly
caricature of one.
Obsessively compulsive haters of President
Gloria Macapagal Arroyo still have negative things to say about her
appointment of retired Supreme Court Justice Jose Melo to the
chairmanship of the Commission on Elections. But, by and large, most
thinking Filipinos believe that his appointment gives the nation a
man of integrity—of strict personal honesty and independence—to
serve as the tribune of the people’s vote. Despite his age, he
seems to be one who has the strength and energy to do the Herculean
task of cleaning the dirty stables of the Comelec.
He is a breath of fresh air compared with the
person he succeeded. In a roundtable at The Times, former chairman
Benjamin Abalos seemed to be prouder of having played golf
with—and beaten—the late President Ferdinand Marcos than of his
performance as Comelec head. And rightly so, for Abalos could not
have been proud of the squalid elections that took place under his
watch.
Computerization mess
Under Abalos, the Comelec had not been
enthusiastic about automation and computerization since 2004. That
year, the Supreme Court voided a contract for nearly 2,000 automatic
counting machines the poll body paid P1.1 billion for (with
taxpayers’ money, needless to say) and ordered it to recover the
money from the supplier.
This hovered above Abalos’ head until he
resigned in ignominy last year, forced to give up his powerful
office by an alleged overpricing and bribery scandal involving the
government of the People’s Republic of China (which would loan the
funds to the Philippines), a Chinese state corporation, ZTE (which
would supply the technology and the brains) and a project to set up
a multibillion-peso national Internet broadband project.
In 2006, Abalos announced that the Comelec could
no longer pilot-test full automation—automated voting and
counting—in the May 2007 elections owing to lack of time. Indeed,
there was yet no Automated Election System Law and no funds had been
set aside for the implementation of the automation pilot tests. Had
there been automation pilot tests in the May 2007 polls, there would
most likely not have been much cheating in the pilot areas.
As he tried to do for the 2004 and 2007
elections, Sen. Richard Gordon, chairman of the Senate Committee on
Constitutional Amendments, Revision of Codes and Laws, is urgently
calling for election automation. As in the past two elections the
thing to do is to try it out in a smaller election. Gordon is now
once more asking everyone concerned to do the work that must be done
to carry out automated elections in the Autonomous Region of Muslim
Mindanao (ARMM) seven months from now.
“There is time to implement automated
elections for ARMM by August, but it must be treated as a matter of
great urgency. The longer it takes to implement computerized
elections the more people will doubt the legality of the vote.
What’s at stake is our right to call ourselves a democracy,”
Gordon said.
New election culture
We must get rid of the Comelec’s manual
counting system in as many places as we can. And we can start with
the ARMM election in August as Gordon proposes.
Automating elections in the ARMM, as a trial run
for automated and computerized national elections in 2010, will not
only encourage peace and security in that region. It will also
reduce the threat to the lives of teachers who serve as Comelec-deputized
election inspectors and other Comelec employees.
No expensive computer units and software are
needed. The computers in schools can be used. Principals, teachers
and students will experience doing their patriotic duty of providing
their computers and their “technical knowhow” to an activity
bigger than their classes: The essential democratic activity of an
election.
The abolition of fraud-prone manual voting and
counting will change our country’s election culture. The grossest
acts of cheating happen in the certificate of canvass level and at
the adding up of these fraudulent CoCs. With computerized
counting—as in the way credit card sums and records of sales in a
store are computerized—it will be easier to trace back how many
votes were really cast for whom in each precinct.
The disappearance of the contents of ballot
boxes will no longer happen. The computerized count in a precinct
would be emailed in a flash simultaneously to the provincial center
and to Comelec headquarters in Manila. And for that matter to the
Namfrel and the CBCP’s watchdog organizations.
Chairman Melo must go ahead and automate the
ARMM election in August—and then the 2010 elections.
|
