LITO AVERIAIT’s roughly 30 months to the next national and local elections in 2022.The past four elections showed that the Commission on Election (Comelec) requires more than enough time to prepare for the automated elections. The Comelec must be making the preparations now. Will it proceed under the assumption that the next national elections will be automated using the same system that was used since 2010?If it proceeds under that assumption, the poll body will have to consider the existing vote counting machines, which the Comelec bought for the 2019 elections. Will the same machines be used? The machines have been in storage and will continue to be in storage until such time that they will have to be opened again, inspected, tested, assessed for usability, and repaired and restored to their top operating condition, if necessary. Or, as it did in 2016, will the Comelec ditch the vote counting machines, which were used only for the second time, and buy another set of machines to be deployed nationwide for the 2022 elections?It has been such a waste of money. The Comelec bought the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines used in 2010 for the 2013 elections with a promise that the machines could still be used in at least two more elections. But the machines were ditched in 2016 and remain in a warehouse for which the Comelec continues to pay storage costs. Will the vote counting machines used in 2016 and 2019 suffer the same fate?Or, will there be a change in the system as draft bills filed in both Houses of Congress seek to pursue? There are at present seven bills filed, six of which are in the House of Representatives, which seek a return to manual voting and manual recording and counting of votes, with election results from the polling place to be transmitted electronically. The authors of the draft bills seek the adoption and implementation of a “hybrid election system.” Only one bill provides a definition of the term, which is “a system using a combination of manual casting of votes, manual counting of votes and electronic transmission of precinct-level election results to the consolidation and canvassing boards, stations or servers.”Two of the bills seek the use of optical mark recognition (OMR)-like ballots, or similar to the ones that have become familiar to the voters — ballots where the names of candidates are pre-printed per position that they seek to be elected. Before the name of each candidate is an oval. The manner of voting involves shading the oval before the name of the candidate chosen by the voter for the position. With OMR-like ballots, cases of over-voting are likely to happen. Over-voting happens when the voter shades more ovals of candidates than the maximum number of ovals allowed for the position. This results in the nullification of votes for the affected position.The other bills seek a return of the pre-automated election system ballots with a fixed number of horizontal lines per contest. Voters are required to write the names of the candidates of their choice in the blank lines.All the proposed bills require that the counting of the votes be done publicly, restoring transparency, which was lost with the use of vote counting machines.Recording of the votes will be done simultaneously as a ballot is being read by the chairman of the Board of Election Inspectors, to be renamed the Electoral Board in the 2019 elections. Two modes of recording will be done: 1) manually filling up a printed form which, as soon as completed following the reading of the last ballot, will serve as the election return; and 2) using a laptop, recording the votes in an electronic spreadsheet-like form which will serve as the electronic election return.When completed and finalized, a copy of the handwritten election return is required to be posted on a wall in the polling place. A photo of the election return as posted is also required to be taken.The contents of the image of the election return as posted will be compared with the electronic election return. Under the proposed bills, if there is any discrepancy in the vote counts as recorded in the handwritten election return and the electronic election return, the contents of the manually prepared election return will prevail. The electronic election return will have to be corrected to match what is recorded in the handwritten election return.Once everything has been finalized, only then will the electronic election return and the image of the election return as posted be transmitted to a canvassing server in the city or municipality for consolidation of the election results.If the authors of the proposed bills would like to see changes in the voting and vote counting in the coming 2022 elections, Congress will have to work on the bills now. The bills at the House of Representatives will have to be consolidated; the language of the law must be carefully crafted. Versions of the law separately passed by both houses will have to go through the bicameral mill. The hybrid election system law must be passed before Congress goes on a break for the Christmas season.In the meantime, the Comelec needs to start preparing the election system to be used in 2022. If the hybrid election system law is not passed, it is highly likely that the Comelec will implement the same Smartmatic system used in the past, a system that the Comelec, election workers and voters have gotten used to.The clock is ticking.
