Editorial: Good to Go?

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Public confidence with the automated polling surged down with less than four months before the 2010 local and national elections. Fears of the failure to transform the traditional manual electoral procedures to an electric and automated scheme increased following the media disclosure that the Commission on Elections (COMELEC) is way behind its timetable of installing the new system.

As revealed by an SWS survey, 47 percent of the Filipinos believe that the counting machines might be sabotaged. Only 44 percent, relatively a close number, trusted COMELEC to live up to its promise of clean elections. What’s more is that 49 percent of the Filipino populace believes that another people power revolt will happen should the automated elections fail. All the fuss lead us back to a single question: Are we prepared?

The automation of elections is not new to our country. Automated elections have been conducted years before in some regions of the archipelago, but then again, are we ready?

The SWS survey, conducted on 24th to the 27th of October 2009 and released early on February, revealed that the apprehension of another people power in case of a failure of elections was more prominent in Luzon, the hub of Edsa I, than in Mindanao and the Visayas.

Qualms of sabotage of the automated counting system were surpassed by concerns over the preparedness of the COMELEC to undertake the automated poll project.

Should the full automation of the national and local election fail, or should there be issues of rigging votes like the previous elections, PGMA might declare failure of elections and lengthen her stay in the presidential seat. This fiasco has been anticipated by lots of individuals, kindling the fire of another people power revolution. Where, then, are we headed after another Edsa?

Since the award of the contract to Smartmatic on July of 2009, the delivery of the counting machines has been delayed to Feb. 28. The situation left a mere two month’s time from delivery to the day of the elections.

The delay in the delivery of the machines would mean delay in the field testing, training of personnel, and the customization and printing of ballots. As counts reveal, there will be 1,630 sets of local candidates, and their names will have to be printed on 1,630 types of ballots. This will require the software on the machines to be customized 1,630 ways to facilitate the counting of votes. Logistics alone pose as a horrendous threat to the automated elections.

Way even before the machines get to reach the COMELEC compound, allegations of the vulnerability of the machines’ system to hacking have been flung all around. COMELEC however shrugged the issue off by wisely saying that there is no such thing as an unhackable or uncrackable system, but that they have done everything to ensure that the system used by the machines shall not be hacked. This though is not enough. It is not enough to hope that things go right.
The coming elections also required decrease in number of polling precincts because of the insufficiency of the number of the machines. Adjacent less populated communities shall share the same precinct. This is also done for ease in transmitting the polling results to a central counting system, which by the way takes only two minutes due to the real time transmission capacity of the machines. Now the brunt does not only hit COMELEC, but including us.

The number of voters is expected to increase, with over a half million overseas absentee voters and the extension of the registration deadline to January 9, but the new scheme of decreasing precincts might even decrease the voting number because of the incapacity of voters, especially in the rural areas to spend money and time on travel.
We are all first-time automated election voters and we don’t even know how the machines or the ballots would look like. All that we know is that we have to shade the ovals before the names of the candidates. That is presumably as easy as taking an exam here in the campus. Even a kindergartner could do that, but once any single component of the automated elections fail, the whole electoral process could fail, putting the future of our country at stake—which is very hard to reverse; even experts can’t.

The turn of events gives us a realistic sense of calling for the authorities to be safe, if they can’t be good at all. That is, dedicating a bit of COMELEC’s thrust on preparing the best manual election that the commission can ever be able to organize.

The obsolete manual count system has been a sanctuary of vote rigging because of lengthened hitch in announcing official results and has presented breaks for cheating and changing results.

COMELEC is on the brink of facing a tough retreat— a very hasty and messy second option. But let us ask ourselves. Are we really ready for the automated election, given our lack of knowledge, the delays, and the probabilities of failure of the electoral process? Or is COMELEC capable of managing an organized change of plans when things fail?