Full automation may not compute
Tomas “Butch” Africa was the administrator of the National Statistics Office (NSO) when the last nationwide census on population and housing was undertaken. This is always a daunting task that is done only every decade. But in the year 2000 it was even more challenging with the Y2K scare at the turn of the millennium. Under Africa’s solid leadership, the National Statistics Office pulled through with flying colors. Butch was an outlier in government service. He was handpicked at the time when the criteria were to choose the best and the brightest, someone who valued public trust and kept the integrity of the post. In 2001 he became the first recipient of Ateneo de Manila’s Government Service Award set up four years earlier, given only to public servants who served with excellence.
When Butch Africa was named administrator of the NSO in 1989, the primary need was a vision to inspire the rank and file. The organization, with the active participation of middle management, appreciated the importance of their role for the first time. To build credibility, Africa published the results of their surveys; he thanked his staff publicly through interviews and awarded them for their achievements. Butch led by example, not missing a single day of work, and being accessible to employees for consultations and discussions. He visited almost all the provinces in the Philippines, holding dialogues with local office heads as well as the rank and file. From indifference, the employees became proud to be a part of NSO.
To meet the Five-Year Development Plan of NSO he quietly retooled and networked the organization in mainframe, microcomputer and other office automation technology. By 1990, the Philippines became the first developing country to process census results entirely through microcomputers. Despite limited government funding, the NSO launched the Civil Registration System-Information Technology Project to provide a more efficient delivery of services and stop the rise of counterfeit documents. Then they distributed the software for free to municipalities and cities.
Africa understood that to realize the development plan, information technology must be at the forefront. So the NSO website and Electronic Bulletin Board was put up; he also introduced the Philippine Statistics Quiz (a nationwide collegiate contest) and the Minimum Basic Needs-Community Based Information System. In 1998, the NSO became the first national agency to win the Philippine Quality Award for Commitment, largely because of Africa’s emphasis on quality management to improve the processing of statistical data and the general operations of the organization. Eight years since he returned to the private sector, the benefits of the innovations he started are still being enjoyed.
Even after Africa left government, he never lost interest in the plight of our country. The letter below is an expert’s opinion on the Comelec’s first venture into a nationwide, fully automated presidential election. Butch knows hardware and the perils attendant to its haphazard application. Comelec should sit up and listen.
“Dear Yoly, former Chief Justice Panganiban has recently cited the reality that inaccurately printed ballots and probable lack of voter capability in correctly filling out the ballots can lead to NO-EL (no elections) or NO-PROC (no proclamation) in the May 2010 elections. These are valid issues related to Comelec’s full automation plan but have not been discussed fully. Attention has only been on the PCOS (Precinct Count Optical Scan), which in media has been heralded by Comelec as being able to effect election results with 99.995-percent accuracy that is ‘one error out of 20,000 markings.’ Let me list down what I think would be concerns:
• The ballots. The Comelec Request for Proposal document requires that ‘each side of the ballot sheet should be able to accommodate at least 300 names of candidates with a minimum font size of 10.’ Presumably, on one side of the ballot will be the names of the candidates for President, Vice President, Senator, Party-list and now, a possible question on Charter change of whatever variation. On the other side will be the names of the candidates for Congress, Governor, Vice Governor, Board member, Mayor, Vice Mayor, and Councillor. The number of distinct master ballots would be about 1,600, considering the elections at the local level. The printing of ballots, some 50 million, should be precise. The Comelec may be faced with, among others, the following scenarios, considering at the same time, the above-mentioned facts:
“In the Loong v. Comelec case (April 14, 1999) cited by him, the Comelec ordered the stoppage of the automated counting in the entire province of Sulu when the machine did not count three ballots, wherein the Comelec officials noticed that the oval space opposite the name of a candidate in Pata, Sulu (a part of the ARMM) was shaded but the ovals were not properly aligned with the candidate’s printed name. As a result, all the ballots cast in the entire province were brought to the Comelec headquarters in Manila for manual counting.
“As explained in Wikipedia, ‘a more serious error is incorrect printing such that all ovals are read as filled, even if this is not the case.’ This error arose in the case of 19,000 absentee ballots in the county of Gwinnett, Georgia, during the 2008 US presidential election. The outline of the ovals was found to be too thick or irregular. This slight difference was discovered during a test run made late in October 2008 since it was not apparent to the naked eye.
“In the field or the public school classroom, it would be difficult to keep the forms dirt-free, dust-free, and at a specified humidity content. Understandably, if the form was dirty, dusty, or rather wet, either the PCOS would reject it, or if accepted, the form could not be read because of the ‘shading’ caused by dirt, dust, smudges, and the like. Cases like these were actually reported by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics in their earlier censuses.
“It is for these reasons that I did not use OMR for any of the nationwide censuses, conducted in some 42,000 barangays from 1989 to 2001 by the National Statistics Office when I was its Administrator.
• The voters. Can the Comelec and the winning bidder train at least 30 million voters (who actually voted in 2007) to correctly mark the ovals corresponding to the candidates of their choice in a two-sided ballot with at least a hundred names on each side in font size 10? Voters need to be trained to shade to cover each distinct oval or box and not stray to the adjacent ones; otherwise, the machine will reject the ballot. Can you imagine a situation when everyone at the precinct — voters, watchers, teachers — can read the contents of the filled-out ballot but the PCOS cannot? If the PCOS rejects a filled-up ballot for various reasons, how would the voter’s choices be counted? Will the ballot be a spoiled one? What if these spoilages would not be few and far between, and not random?
“Chief Justice Panganiban dissented from the majority decision in Loong v. Comelec to uphold the Comelec’s manual count of the automated ballots. He cited as his main reason that ‘there were no rules on how to manually count electronic ballots. The rules on manual counting could not be used in appreciating automated ballots … They were good, for instance, in determining whether a ballot was written by one hand or two hands, but not in appreciating the voter’s intent via the mere shading of pre-printed ballots.’
“I think that the probability that at least three ballots will be misprinted and cannot be read by the PCOS in a municipality and/or that three of 1,000 voters in a precinct will not be able to fill up the ballot correctly would be rather high. I would rather be wrong than right on this because NO-EL or NO-PROC may just happen unless Comelec prepares for manual counting as well.
“Finally, the Comelec depends entirely on the winning bidder, Total Information Management (TIM)/Smartmatic, to install and implement a technology that it has little knowledge of and that has been strongly objected to by some information technology (IT) practitioners with long experience in processing election returns.
“Thank you for helping bring up these very important issues.”
After 18 years (1973-2001) or almost his entire professional life served in government, Tomas Africa finally accepted international consultancy work because he needed to “make some real money to fix his old house that was falling apart.”
As inscribed in the first Government Service Award:
“For inspiring creativity and volunteerism, for exemplifying what a civil servant should be — one who performs his day-to-day duties with fidelity and integrity — thus providing a living model of an honest public servant.”
I for one am grateful that once upon a time, there was at least one civil servant who never betrayed the public’s trust.
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Contact the author at e-mail ms.comfeedback@gmail.com.
