Faster And Cleaner Elections…Is Automation The Key?
By Angelo Miguel M. Calabio
In spite of fierce resistance from numerous critics, the Commission on Elections (COMELEC) recently awarded a multi-billion peso procurement contract to Smartmatic International and Total Information Management Corp. (Smartmatic-TIM), signaling the end of decades of heated and blood-laden manual elections and paving the way for cleaner and more transparent elections through the long overdue process of automation.
Under the terms of the contract, the Filipino-Dutch consortium (Smartmatic-TIM) would supply 82,200 Precint Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines, devices that can automatically count votes indicated by shaded marks beside a candidate’s name then transmit the total precinct count to canvass centers. Thus, in principle at least, the days of long-drawn sagas of manual counting, which was especially prone to electoral cheating, were over and the classic schemes of election fraud, like the “dagdag-bawas” and ballot box snatching, would become obsolete. Clean and honest elections, the sound of such a claim would really ring a bell to any concerned Filipino citizen.
However, with this new scheme come new conflicts. Although automated elections could potentially be a lot better than its manual predecessor, it also raises some genuine concerns. In the first place, the main goal of any election would be for people to practice their right to vote, and not just vote for the sake of it, but, for everyone’s voice to be heard and counted. Thus, concerns were raised about the machines’ ability to count votes from ballots that could contain some errors or erasures, mistakes that a typical Filipino could be prone to. Critics of poll automation points to this possibility of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of spoiled ballots being decisive to the eventual result of the election, a concern that the COMELEC asserts would be simply addressed by a massive voter’s information campaign. Quite a simple solution isn’t it? Well, think again.
Automated elections are quick and swift, but, it also brings a lot of potential problems to the table. Unlike the traditional electoral personnel, which happen to be public school teachers here in the Philippines, machines could not solve even the simplest form of ballot confusion. Erasures, unclear marks and the like, such were the simple factors that made the difference between former US Vice-President Al Gore being in the White House and him lecturing on climate change to a crowd of university students in “The Inconvenient Truth.” Therefore, critics of the new scheme are towing this line of argument against poll automation, for if the United States of America, the world’s recognized superpower, had issues with this process, what more for a third-world country like the Philippines?
The objective verdict? We should agree a bit more to the side of poll automation. Yes, the critics do have a point, but, such cases could be greatly neutralized by the information campaign that the COMELEC has been talking about. Although such cases would be impossible to avoid, it could be greatly reduced, which is the important thing to consider. As far as the US case is concerned, we could well point out that Al Gore would have been president if the US followed the same electoral process that the Philippines currently adopts. Unlike in the US, were electoral votes are the ones that matter, it is popular votes that count here in the Philippines. Thus, Gore would have beaten Bush by a comfortable margin if they slugged it out in a Philippine-style election.
Therefore, critics of poll automation should stop wrangling about the process and just concentrate on winning their respective election bids cleanly and decisively. Whether it be manual, automated or any manner of counting votes, a candidate really chosen by his people to serve them would end up seating pretty in the hot seat of power.