"There ought to be no turning back after the crucial and long overdue shift."
"There ought to be no turning back after the crucial and long overdue shift."
Months after the 2019 midterm elections, it’s the fate of the automated elections that seems to be up for scrutiny. For some quarters, an hours-long delay in the transmission of votes during canvassing was supposedly enough to cast doubts on the credibility of the polls. There were even calls to invalidate the results of the entire elections and switch to a hybrid manual and automated system.
A recent Pulse Asia survey, however, found that 91 percent, or nine out of 10 Filipinos, are in favor of continuing the fully automated elections system going forward, with 84 percent expressing big trust in the results and 87 percent saying they were satisfied. A further 94 percent saying the vote-counting machines were easy to use, while some 55 percent even said they were able to cast their vote in less than 30 minutes.
This tells us that, among others, the noise against the automated election system does not have popular support. In a press briefing organized by Stratbase ADRi and Democracy Watch, Pulse Asia president Ronald Holmes said that voters, “trust the system, and they want automation because faster results make them find the election credible.”
Moreover, reports of problems regarding the use of VCMs might have been slightly blown out of proportion, with a mere 6 percent of respondents saying they experienced malfunctioning VCMs, which Holmes said was “a small percentage.”
“And of those who experienced malfunctioning VCMs, 57 percent left their ballots to the Board of Election Inspectors, while 40 percent did not vote when told the VCM was not working but returned to vote and fed their ballot to the new VCM,” he said.
These findings were confirmed by the random manual audit done by the Commission on Elections RMA Committee in partnership with Legal Network for Truthful Elections, which found that the VCM count had been 99.9953 percent accurate.
All these paints one picture, Holmes said. It represents a validation of a system in which the problems of the “archaic” manual method are a thing of the past.
“One reason is really the ease of voting. Gone are the days when the voter had to write the surname of the candidate, and you have to wait three weeks to find out the results, have winners proclaimed,” he said.
These numbers represent continuing progress for the automated system. The 87-percent satisfaction rating, for instance, is four percent higher than the figure posted in the aftermath of the 2016 polls. The near-perfect accuracy rate is the highest since the country switched to the automated system in 2010. Transmission and validation turnout had also become faster despite the transparency server glitch.
That being said, no system is completely faultless. During the May polls, among the problems encountered by voters include the long lines, not finding their names in the voters’ list, and the deactivation of their registration. One percent said they didn’t trust the electoral system, while another 1 percent could not vote because the VCM machine broke down.
Outside these isolated incidents and sentiments, there is a near-unanimous consensus that the headways achieved by the switch to the automated system need to be maintained even as the Comelec and other entities learn from the problems they encountered. The widespread vote buying, for instance, is proof that some politicians might have observed that tampering the system was not feasible, so they had to directly engage the voters.
“We should be more focused on going after, on accountability aspect, the vote buying and the vote sellers,” said Ona Carritos of LENTE. “We’re good with the procedure. People believe the results of the automated elections. What is happening is the fraud outside the machine or outside the systems we use. We need to focus on that for the 2022 polls and the succeeding elections.”
What is clear, too, is the rejection of any insinuation that we discard a system that has clearly worked toward the strengthening of our democracy and shift to something that’s not as tested. Indeed, why should we risk experimental, unproven concepts on the very foundations of our democratic system?
For instance, there are proposals to amend the Automated Elections System law to remove the provision that limits potential providers from qualifying because the law requires the system to have been deployed in past elections with similar conditions and scale. This does not make sense. The wisdom of this provision is to guarantee the success and credibility of national elections.
Comelec spokesperson James Jimenez said starting with a new system might pose a challenge especially since the upcoming polls will determine the next president. “How long does it take to establish the reliability and accuracy of the system to be used for the first time to the level that you would be comfortable using it for presidential elections?” he said.
Our standards on what system will we accept as reliable should be higher, he added.
Claudette Guevara, Secretary General of DemocracyWatch Philippines said, “For a country riddled with patronage politics and corruption, automation has proved effective in addressing a decades old problem wholesale election cheating. The continuing economic gains of our country are directly linked to the stability of our government instituted by our credible democratic processes.”
True enough, there ought to be no turning back after the crucial and long overdue shift to automation in 2010. Widespread popular support is critical for any democratic exercise such as the elections, and that is something that automation was able to achieve. As the integrity and credibility of the polls are non-negotiable in a democracy, the people’s overwhelming trust in the electoral process go hand-in-hand with rejecting any attempts to throw us back to the dark ages of manual elections.
