EDITORIAL - Vigilant support

After a falling-out, Total Information Management has decided to push through with its partnership with the Barbados-registered Dutch-Venezuelan company Smartmatic for the automation of the general elections next year. If reports are accurate, the two companies continue to bicker over financing, profit-sharing and control of the operations, even if the Constitution limits foreign partners to 40 percent of everything. Suspicions also persist about unseen hands that are supposedly manipulating the deal.

But the settlement of the misunderstanding between the two companies, on pain of being prosecuted by the government for breach of contract, raises hopes that the country will not have to make do once again with manual voting in May 2010. Few Filipinos believe that automation will end poll fraud completely. But the expectation is that automation will make cheating harder. Simply cutting the wait for results in the national races from three weeks to three days would be a dramatic step forward. It would mean a drastic reduction in the period for vote-padding and snatching ballot boxes and other forms of vote tampering.

Is the automated system fraud-proof? We won’t know until we try. Chairman Jose Melo of the Commission on Elections is appealing to the people to give the new system a chance. Concerned citizens and organizations are aware of the potential problems and can keep a close watch on steps in the automation process where opportunities for cheating can be introduced. The vote counting machines must be closely guarded against tampering, from their arrival in Manila to their distribution and installation nationwide. The Comelec will put the machines through several tests for glitches and possibilities for hacking.

The nation has been employing the same manual election system for several decades and is ready to try something new. Now that the automation process is underway, it deserves to be supported, but with vigilance against anyone who will try to undermine the system. Responsible citizens have a stake in making automation work.