Poll advisory council looking at paper-based automation machines for 2010 elections

The inter-agency Advisory Council on Poll Automation is eyeing the use of “paper-based” automation machines in the 2010 elections to save on costs.

Edmundo Casiño, alternate representative of the Philippine Computer Society (PCS) to the council, said they also reached a “consensus” that only one company should supply the machines.

Aside from the PCS, the other members of the council are Commission on Information and Communications Technology, Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting, Department of Science and Technology, and Department of Education.

“Based on the experience we had in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), ideally it is better to have only one vendor... Whether it’s DRE or OMR, preferably to save the headache of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to contract a single vendor,” Casiño said in an interview.

He is pertaining to direct recording electronics (DRE) and optical mark reader (OMR) machines used by the Comelec in the regional elections in ARMM last August.

DRE is a technology wherein the voting, counting and canvassing are fully automated.

In OMR, the names of the candidates are printed on paper with corresponding blank ovals. Voters vote by shading the ovals with pencils provided and the ballots are then counted and canvassed by machine.

Casiño said that for “budgetary purposes,” the council is considering paper-based poll machines in 2010, whether it is OMR or other machines like direct ballot imaging.

“However… the Joint Congressional Oversight Committee still wants to have DRE. There are camps that are against it because there are some flaws on DRE, especially in the United States. That’s why they are going back to paper-based,” noted Casiño, a former chairman of the council.

DRE, he maintained is “hard to audit and they cannot trust the results of electronic data.” – Sheila Crisostomo