Preparations are in full swing for the new president’s (and vice president’s) inauguration at the end of the month. The oath-taking ceremonies are in Manila but at least P-Noy’s “people’s celebration” will be held at the Quezon Memorial Circle in Quezon City.
It is an interesting choice as far as deviating from the traditional sites for such events is concerned. The Elliptical Circle and its surrounding areas form an emerging urban nexus, what with SM North and Ayala’s TriNoma nearby and even spots to the east like the UP-Ayala Technohub.
I was involved in the design of the facility as a landscape architect but had not seen it completed and fully functioning until an invitation came from my brother Mike (the film director and Palanca awardee).
The whole Alcazaren clan accepted the invitation mainly because of the selected venue (as a clan, we normally look for new places to celebrate). Many of us, including my wife Twink, have heard the buzz about the selected restaurant, Kanin Club. It is one of over a dozen restaurants in the center of the Technohub and seems to be one of the main reasons people flock to the site.
Of course, there are cafes, pizza parlors, a spaghetti place, video game parlors, as well as banks and a National Book Store branch. These offerings are set in a pedestrian-scaled development with a grand plaza and modern fountains. The amenities were originally meant to serve the technology startups and call centers housed in the 37-hectare development.
Kanin Club is a great place to take balikbayan visitors as well as to pig out on Filipino comfort food. We tried almost everything on the menu, but all agreed that the best dish was the “pampabata crispy dinuguan.”
The Technohub was opened in late 2008 and has established itself as a refuge for Commonwealth commuters, along with students and faculty from the main UP campus. It’s a good thing that a pedestrian bridge is under construction, connecting that side with the Technohub.
I do hope that UP pushes through with its plans for the UP Arboretum just behind the Technohub. It is such a shame that the campus’s green oasis is not made accessible and usable by the public. If this happens, then the arboretum should be connected to the Quezon Memorial Circle and the Ninoy Aquino Parks and Wildlife Center.
Which brings us back to our new president’s planned celebration at the circle, and a late feedback from a reader named LF about the recently concluded electronic electoral exercise, and a response by another reader about the process and how it could be improved.
I quote his e-mail liberally:
“Mr. Alcazaren, this is in reaction to the rather lengthy quote you published from another reader. I’m writing to you for the sake of information — that many ideas are not new and have (issues surrounding them)…
“Here are some of the major ones:
“DRE was quite widely used for a while until recently, when the US elections were marred by transparency and security issues. The main problem is that it has no paper trail to back up the data stored in it. Printing receipts is also not an option, as it is a tool for vote-buying (show your receipt that you voted for so-and-so, and you get paid).
“Touchscreens actually make the computer-illiterate more apprehensive than a pen and a 30-inch-long piece of paper, according to surveys. The thought of using a computer is scary for them. The only upside of touchscreens is that you can adjust the resolution for people with poor eyesight, which you can’t do with paper (yet).
“On the Central Voting System Proposal — the best-case scenario for voters is to be able to vote right in their own homes, through a web-based application or even through mobile phones. The problem is the availability of service. We do not have the infrastructure to support 50 million voters logging in within 12 hours. Sure, it’s not unheard of. Facebook gets two billion hits a day, and Google, even more. They have the server capacity to do this 24/7 all year round. But to put up the infrastructure to support 50 million voters for 12 hours of use? It’s highly impractical. Again, this idea isn’t new. It was just very quickly scrapped and never made it to the media.
“On removing USB drives — there really is no problem with the USB drives themselves. It’s actually the best way to introduce the BEI’s security key into the system to facilitate transmission of results to the central server. The problem is with the voting machine’s autorun function when a USB device is plugged in. That’s what needs to be disabled because Windows (the operating system of the PCOS machines), as a consumer-centered product, has autorun enabled in its default setting (or instead use machines that don’t run on Windows). If you have looked at the contents of your USB or flash drive, you will see a file named “autorun.” Windows, with autorun enabled, will run this file once the USB device is plugged in. This file can be modified to insert illegal code into the machine, and this is the security threat with USB drives. Disable autorun, or use an operating system such as Linux that doesn’t have an autorun function, and the problem is solved.
“Quoting the previous reader feedback, ‘Vote counting would then rely on the backup CD/DVD date that can be transmitted from any location later where online link is available or even brought to the central voting system.’ The current system already allows this, except that they transport either the whole machine or just the CF card to another location. In fact, there isn’t a 1-to-1 ratio of PCOS machines to GSM/satellite modems. The problem isn’t the election system we’re using, it’s the infrastructure that we have available to support it. There are remote voting centers where you have to travel two hours just to get signal again.
“My point: We spent P2 to P4 billion to cut down the old canvassing time by 15 days or 37.5 percent. And another P3 to P5 billion to save nine to 11 hours, or about 1.25 percent of the old system’s time. Money well spent for the canvassing system (much, much more if they made their two-to-five-day goal), but not so much for the counting machines.
“The old manual system didn’t cheat. It’s the people involved in it one way or another who did. A cheater will find a way to cheat, whatever game you tell him to play. Changing the rules without changing the players doesn’t make the game any cleaner. Countries such as Germany are reverting to a manual system because of the prohibitive costs of counting machines (but they still transmit and canvass electronically). Again, nothing was wrong with the old system.
“If the system had to be changed, it didn’t have to be changed all at once. It could have been a phased transition, with a lot more attention put into voter’s education. All the public really knew about the new system was that ‘may bilog, may bilog na hugis itlog.’”
Clustered precincts was a really bad idea. The whole point of having precincts with no more than 250 people each was to make the process more manageable. In the old system with a 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. voting window, that would more or less mean a little more than 40 voters per hour. In the new one, we had 1,000 people (sometimes more) per clustered precinct with a 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. window, but should have been only until 6 p.m. That meant more than 80 voters per hour, with the same number of BEIs. Talk about stress!”
* * *
Well, thanks, LF, for your very detailed feedback. I welcome and try to give space for all feedback. I agree with you on the clustered precincts and will write about this and other political boundaries in a future article. I do hope the system improves for the next democratic exercise.
In the meantime, let’s swear in our new leaders and get on with the business of getting the Philippines back on its feet.
* * *
Feedback is welcome. Please e-mail the writer at paulo.alcazaren@gmail.com.