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With congressional leaders declining suggestions of a postponement,
it appears to be all systems go for next month’s elections in the
Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM).
The possibility of postponement surfaced when
leaders of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front said the three-year
tenure of regional officials to be elected on August 11 could delay
the implementation of a peace agreement, which Manila and the MNLF
are reportedly close to signing. The two sides only recently reached
a breakthrough on ancestral domain, the most contentious issue of
the 11-year-old talks.
Leading the objection to a postponement is the
ARMM League of Mayors. For one, Mayor Lampa Pandi of Poona-Bayabao
in Lanao del Sur was reported saying, “Let’s [proceed with the
voting] as it would complement the Mindanao peace process.”
The Commission on Elections (Comelec) expects
some 1.61 million registered voters to troop to 10,805 voting
precincts in 2,470 barangays in 113 towns and two cities throughout
the ARMM.
Up for grabs are the posts of regional governor
and vice-governor as well as 24 seats in the Regional Legislative
Assembly.
Local, regional and national officials also seem
to be in no mood to defer the ARMM polls because they are keen to
try out what the Comelec calls the first fully automated elections
in the country.
Two technologies
The Comelec has approved the application of two
technologies for the automated ARMM polls: Direct Recording
Electronic (DRE), through private contractor Smartmatic-Sahi
Technology, and Optical Mark Reader (OMR) provided by Avante
International Technology.
In Maguindanao voters will use touch-screen DRE
machines at the precinct level. In the other five provinces—Shariff
Kabunsuan, Lanao del Sur, Basilan, Sulu, and Tawi-Tawi—voters will
shade their choices on customized paper ballots, which will be
counted and canvassed in consolidation centers throughout the
region.
Comelec expects to be able to proclaim the
winning candidates in less than 36 hours.
Poll automation seems set to become a reality
after a number of miscues in the past. In 2004, for instance, the
Comelec—then chaired by Benjamin Abalos—was ready to use
automated ballot counting machines; however, the project was
permanently shelved when the Supreme Court detected irregularities
in the multibillion-peso contract.
Notwithstanding the questionable deal,
government leaders continued to press for automation, which many
believe would help put to an end to the widespread cheating that
regularly mar Philippine elections.
While politicians pin their hopes for clean
elections on computerization, one of the country’s information
technology (IT) pioneers is not as sanguine about automation.
Fresh from a six-week research fellowship at the
University of Oxford ’s Internet Institute, IT engineer Roberto
Verzola warned that electronic voting and counting machines bring
their own set of troubles.
Speaking at the Kapihan sa Sulo media forum last
Saturday, Verzola said these troubles include: uninitialized
machines, which make ballot stuffing possible; uncounted or lost
votes; vote totals that exceed the actual number of registered
voters; unauthorized software replacement, among others.
Verzola’s Oxford fellowship allowed him to
review the experiences of several countries that had earlier
automated their elections and found well-documented cases of
“problems, errors and failures.”
Verzola traced the automated-poll troubles to
“deep-seated causes that are inherent in complex technologies,”
such as software bugs, “which are always present even in
high-quality software;” hardware problems such as miscalibration;
environmental stresses that may worsen hardware problems; poor or
flawed design; human error; and malicious tampering.
Verzola pointed out that “insoluble
problems” associated with DRE voting machines have led to their
phase-out in some parts of the United States, notably California and
Florida. At around $8,000 each, DRE machines are also “much more
expensive” than optical scanners worth about $7,000 per, he added.
If election automation goes nationwide, two to
three DRE machines will be needed for each of the over 250,000
polling precincts across the archipelago. With OMR, only four to
five optical scanners would be needed per municipality.
Two proposals
Apparently conceding that it is now too late to
stop the automated polls in ARMM, Verzola presented Comelec with two
proposals based on his Oxford study.
First, he urged election officials to use
double-entry accounting methods in election tabulation in order to
minimize clerical errors, which plague the Comelec’s single-entry
tabulation system.
Second, he called for a transparent
post-election audit of machine results through a manual count of
ballots from a random sample of precincts to ensure detection, with
a 95 percent or higher level of confidence, of any discrepancy large
enough to alter the election outcome.
Going by Verzola’s knowledgeable caveats, the
quest for clean elections will not end with automation. In fact, the
public needs to remain vigilant—perhaps more so than ever—in the
face of new technologies familiar only to a few.
When the outcome is in the hands of a small
circle of specialists, the credibility of elections will always come
under doubt. “Hello, Garci” could soon be replaced by “Hello,
IT.”
dansoy26@yahoo.com
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