The elections in the Philippines can never be transparent and secure under the fully automated election system in use since 2010, Senator Imee Marcos said on Tuesday
Marcos, who heads the Senate committee on electoral reforms and people’s participation, sponsored on Monday the committee report endorsing a hybrid election system as proposed by Senate President Vicente Sotto III in Senate Bill 7, or the Hybrid Election Act filed in July last year.
Meanwhile, four election system providers would participate in the four-day online consultative meetings by the Office for Overseas Voting of the Commission on Elections that started on Tuesday.
“The purpose of the consultation is to be able to gather enough information on online voting that can be presented to Congress for its consideration. If and when such a system is eventually put into action depends on Congress,” Comelec spokesman James Jimenez said in a statement.
Marcos said the hybrid election system would entail the manual tallying of votes at the precinct level to ensure that all vote counting was held in full public view and was open to video recording and livestreaming for future fact-checking.
“How do we know that our votes are counted correctly by a fully automated election system? We don’t,” Marcos said.
“Each step of the election process must be open to scrutiny. Since 2010, we have given too much importance to speed and convenience at the expense of transparency.”
Marcos deplored what she described as the vote-counting irregularities that had occurred since the AES was used, like the early transmission of votes, foreign access in election servers, installation of an additional device known as a “queuing server” in the middle of the transmission process, script change in the middle of the live transmission of results, and incomplete transmissions of results.
Marcos also said the timeline for filing certificates of candidacy must be moved from mid-October to the 15th of December preceding an election.
“The consequence of this change is limiting the substitution of candidates to only cases of death and disqualification, so as not to disrupt the timeline for the timely printing and distribution of ballots to all precincts in the whole archipelago,” Marcos said.
The printing of ballots, she said, would no longer be outsourced but would be confined to the National Printing Office.
She said a bar code, which could be scanned to project a ballot’s digital image and authenticate it, would be a new feature on the official ballots.
If a discrepancy of at least 2 percent occurred between the vote tallies done manually and transmitted electronically, she said, an automatic recount for the position under question would be in order.
Although a hybrid election system would add to the workload of teachers and election officers, Marcos said, there would be greater transparency.
“The need for a random manual audit under the AES points to its lack of transparency in reading ballots. Manual vote counting will, at the very outset, ensure transparency and the security of our votes,” Marcos said.