Computerized Elections in the Philippines
Understanding Philippine Elections and the Bid for Poll Automation
Jul 23, 2009
Notwithstanding the rapid advances in technology, the Philippines has until recently been living in the Stone Age when it comes to the conduct of elections. Elections in the Philippines have always been undertaken manually, where the counting of votes could take months before the winners are proclaimed. This is especially the case for elections involving national positions, which are prone to cheating and other electoral frauds. Proponents of poll automation hope to lessen, if not solve, these perennial problems.
The Philippine Electoral Process
Philippine elections are held in May every three years for both national and local positions. The national positions are president, vice president, senators and party-list representatives. Local positions are governors, vice governors, board members, mayors, vice mayors, councilors and congressmen. Under the Philippine Constitution, the term of office for the president, vice president and senators is six years and is timed to end on the expiration of the term of office for local officials, which is three years. The party-list representatives, which represent marginalized sectors such as farmers and urban poor groups, are elected for a three-year term and sit as members of congress.
The election is conducted by the Commission on Elections (Comelec), which is an independent constitutional body composed of a chairperson and six commissioners. Majority of its members are required by law to be lawyers.
Manual Election System
Voting is held nation-wide in schools designated as polling precincts. The votes are cast by writing on a ballot the names of candidates from the national to the local level, and the ballot is thereafter dropped inside a steel ballot box. Given the number of positions to be filled - on the average 40 - the voting process is tedious, not to mention the fact that voters will have to manually write the names of their candidates. This contributes to post-election controversies because the names of candidates are sometimes not spelled correctly which could lead to the exclusion of such votes.
A Board of Election Inspectors (BEI), composed of three people who are mostly public school teachers, mans the polling precincts. At the end of voting, the BEI proceeds to manually count the votes by reading the names of voted candidates on each ballot in the presence of poll watchers and recording the number of votes for each candidate on a tally sheet called election return (ER). The ERs and ballot boxes are then transported to the city or municipal hall where the results contained in the ERs from all precincts are canvassed or totaled. At this point, the winning local officials, with the exception of congressmen, are proclaimed.
Copies of ERs generated at the precinct level are transmitted to the province (much like a county in the US), Comelec and Congress for the canvass of votes, and proclamation of winners, for congressmen and provincial/city officials, senators and party-list representatives, and president and vice president, respectively.
This multi-step process is long and tedious and provides opportunities for electoral fraud, such as substitution or stuffing of ballot boxes, vote-padding or shaving which is called in the vernacular as dagdag-bawas (literally adding-subtracting).
Automated Election System
Although the Poll Modernization Law took effect as early as 1997, it is only now that computerization of Philippine elections is being seriously considered. With the passage of RA 9369 in 2007, which amended RA 8436, Comelec has been mandated to computerize the upcoming May 2010 elections. For this purpose, the Comelec has contracted with the Dutch company Smartmatic and its local partner Total Information Management, Inc. (TIM) on July 10, for the supply of Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines. The PCOS are a form of Optical Mark Reader (OMR) machines that function by reading and counting the markings made by voters on the ballots after the same are fed to the machines.
Under an automated system voters will no longer have to write the names of candidates. The voting is done by either darkening the ovals, completing broken arrows, or making any authorized mark opposite the names of candidates vying for a particular position. At the end of voting in every precinct, the results are electronically transmitted to a central counting center (which could be a city/municipality or province) for consolidation and proclamation of the winners. Results are expected to come out in less than a week.This clearly cuts away the multi-layered process in a manual election system and the concomitant opportunites for fraud.
Concerned Citizens Movement Supreme Court Petition
On July 9, a day before Comelec and TIM-Smartmatic were set to sign the automation contract, the Concerned Citizens Movement (CCM) sought to stop the signing of the contract by filing a petition with the Philippine Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, while entertaining the petition, did not grant CCM's request for a temporary restraining order to stop the contract signing.
According to lawyer Harry Roque, lead counsel for CCM, the automation contract violates the poll automation law by seeking to implement a nation-wide computerized elections in 2010 even before pilot testings are done in selected areas of the country. Roque also claims that Smartmatic admitted in its website that the PCOS machines have a high margin of error and are not secure in the transmission of results. The Comelec views the petition as nothing but an attempt to derail poll automation in the coming elections. The Supreme Court is expected to come out with a decision anytime early next month which will determine the fate of poll automation in the Philippines.
References:
Modernization of the Electoral Process. July 22, 2009. <www.comelec.gov.ph/modernization/history.html>
Republic Act No. 9369 (Philippine Poll Automation Law).
Batas Pambansa Blg. 881 (Omnibus Election Code of the Philippines).
1987 Philippine Constitution.
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