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THE late Neptali Gonzales was deeply suspicious of voting machines.
When shown a computer that could record, count, and transmit the
results of the vote in hours rather than days or weeks, Gonzales
looked the vendor in the eye and asked in his best Presbyterian
manner: “How do we know that what it will record, count, and
transmit are those that the voter chose?”
In contrast, Sen. Richard Gordon is an unabashed
promoter of technologies that will make elections faster and free of
fraud. Almost single-handedly, he caused the skittish Commission on
Elections (Comelec) to agree to automated elections provided that
the system and procedure that will be used in the 2010 national
election are first tried out in the election in August in the
Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM).
Two prototypes were selected: the Direct
Recording Electronic (DRE) technology and the Optical Mark Reader (OMR)
technology. The experience in the ARMM will form the scaffold of
“an automated election system for nationwide use in 2010.”
It’s not clear in Comelec Resolution 8415,
Feb. 6, 2008, if a hybrid of the two technologies will be
considered. It seems an either-or proposition, a Hobson’s choice,
as far as I can tell.
DRE will be used in Maguindanao while OMR will
be deployed in Lanao del Sur, Shariff Kabunsuan, Basilan, Sulu and
Tawi-Tawi.
DRE is a touch-screen or touch-pad machine. No
paper ballot is necessary as the names of the candidates and the
offices for which they are running will all be displayed on the
computer screen. The voter directly enters his choices
electronically into a memory cartridge, a diskette or a smart-card
that will be added to the precinct, municipal, provincial and
national tallies also electronically.
OMR, on the other hand, still requires voters to
fill up a paper ballot that will be scanned and counted with
specially designed machines that are able to detect invalid marks
but not misspelled names. If the ballot is rejected then the voter
can fill up a fresh one, if allowed by the rules of the Comelec.
Votes will be tallied electronically from the precinct to the
national levels.
Are these voting systems and procedures secure?
DRE, as Gonzales intuited, is not completely
secure. No matter how honest and diligent the election officers are,
there can be errors or fraud that can be committed by the
programmers or people who have access to the software before it’s
installed in the machines.
David L. Dill, a computer scientist at Stanford
University, said: “I don’t think that they can make it secure
enough, no matter what their procedure, or how they design the
machine, or how the machines are inspected at independent
laboratories . . . [T]he actual processes are . . . much worse than
what is achievable.” (Technology Review, Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, Feb. 2004).
When the source code of Diebold, the industry
leader in touch-screen voting, was examined by experts in Johns
Hopkins University and Rice University “major weaknesses” were
found. Diebold, since then, says that it has updated its source
code.
Who will examine the capabilities and possible
defects of the source code that Smartmatic-Sahi Technologies, Inc.
will install in its DRE machines?
The question that Gonzales asked strikes at the
core of automated voting. How does the voter know that the choices
he made are the ones that will be recorded in the machine’s
memory? There’s no way anyone will know if a vote for Candidate A
was recorded for Candidate B. Any recount will show the vote to be
for Candidate B.
The OMR system partly answers this question.
Since the voter will write his choices on a paper ballot that will
then be scanned and recorded, he knows that the candidates he
selected are the ones that will enter the memory bank of the
machine. If the paper ballots are kept by the Comelec, then a
meaningful recount is possible.
A solution is to combine the strengths of the
two voting technologies. Assuming an error- and fraud-free source
code, the Comelec can require a verifiable audit trail in the form
of a permanent record that the voter can check immediately before
leaving the precinct and the candidate can demand to be shown after
all the votes have been tallied but before the proclamation.
This is an expensive option. A printer will be
attached to the touch-screen machine that can print out on demand a
paper record that the voter can inspect for accuracy. But it should
not be brought out of the polling booth because it could lead to
vote selling.
The election using either system may not be as
quick as what Richard Gordon wants but it will be relatively
accurate—the minimum requirement for a functioning representative
democracy.
My last point is cost. How much will it cost to
buy either the DRE or the OMR machines or a hybrid of the two?
Renting the machines or service contracting will
not do for reasons of security and credibility. Unless the
electorate is convinced of the integrity of the machines and their
software, the election will not be credible with all that it implies
for political harmony and stability.
If money becomes a problem, which is the better
choice? I vote for OMR at the precinct level. Scanners are cheaper
and sturdier than touch-screen computers.
All this depends finally on the field trials in
the ARMM. How Comelec will compare in a scientific way these two
systems is an interesting question in technology assessment to which
I might return after August.
opinion@manilatimes.net
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