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Last March 4, the Diliman, Quezon City campus of the University of
the Philippines held its annual student council elections. Five of
its 25 colleges and institutes computerized their polls.
These were the College of Engineering, College
of Business Administration, College of Mass Communications,
Institute of Library and Information Science, and College of
Statistics.
For still undetermined reasons, the National
College of Public Administration and Governance decided at the last
minute to retain the manual method of voting and counting of
ballots. Unfortunately, there were insufficient numbers of
University of the Philippines Linux Users Group members to configure
on time the Halalan system for the College of Social Sciences and
Philosophy.
Since UP is the bellwether for possible social
and political trends in the Philippines, it would be best to examine
more closely the implications of this pioneering effort at
computerized elections.
As expected, voting and counting of ballots were
faster when automated. UP Diliman Vice Chancellor for Student
Affairs Elizabeth Enriquez said in a telephone interview that
computerized voting took only an average of two minutes for each
voter as he or she pointed and clicked with the mouse on the names
of candidates of his or her choice listed on the computer terminals.
Results were tabulated and announced within 20
to 40 minutes after voting centers in the five colleges closed at 5
p.m. or 7 p.m., the latter time being for colleges with graduate
students.
In contrast, manual counting results in the
other 20 colleges and institutes were known only at around 2 a.m. or
3 a.m., as has always been the case for decades. This is despite the
fact that only around 10,000 of the slightly over 22,000 students in
UP Diliman voted in this year’s elections.
Today’s UP students, unlike earlier
generations of the university, are hardly interested in campus and
national political affairs. But Enriquez told this writer a good
number of the voters remarked in Filipino, “Wishing that national
elections were computerized as well.”
She later asked UNPLUG President John Bitanga, a
20-year-old computer science major, if the Halalan system their
organization had written and configured could be used also by the
Comelec. He replied that voters would first have to be computer
literate.
The UP administration did not spend a single
centavo to computerize the student council elections. The hardware
and peripherals used were those already in the colleges’ computer
laboratories.
Four of the participating colleges used Halalan,
a student council electoral software UNPLUG members had developed
running on Open Source.
The College of Statistics used its own electoral
system, an Excel program integrated into the college’s SAS
relational database and PHP Web scripting platforms. Its developer
was Ryan Lansangan, a junior faculty member of this college who
doubles as its webmaster.
As the UP experience shows, neither funding nor
highly sophisticated technologies are the primary factors for the
success of computerized elections. Rather, it is the willingness of
the voters to use the system.
Such willingness comes from the voters having
already been exposed to computers and not technophobes themselves.
As Enriquez told this writer, “I suppose all UP students today are
computer literate.”
This implies that the Comelec would probably
have to introduce computerized elections in the Philippines on a
gradual basis, over three national elections perhaps. Early adopters
would have to be in Metro Manila and other highly urbanized areas
where PCs and Internet cafés are now common sights.
The next national elections will still be in May
2010. But it would be worthwhile for the country’s leaders to
examine UP’s experience in computerizing its student council
elections.
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