EDITORIAL - Prepare the teachers

Now that senators have had their publicity and the executives of the consortium that will undertake poll automation have given assurance that they have no links at all with the First Family, the project can get underway in earnest. Commission on Elections Chairman Jose Melo has vowed to make it costly, and not just in financial terms, for Smartmatic and its Philippine partner Total Information Management to abort the project or mess it up. So it looks like the country will have its first automated elections after all.

The new system will still need watching. Manning the frontlines in the campaign to make the 2010 general elections as credible as possible are public school teachers, who will be deputized by the Comelec. The teachers – all half a million of them – are used to the manual system of voting and need to be thoroughly trained in handling the new system. The task is additional work for already overburdened teachers. They need to spare time for training in the automated system. They will have to participate in the testing of the machines and the dry run before election day. They must know what to watch out for: indications of vote tampering, vote buying and flying voters.

The teachers also need sufficient security. In 2007, a teacher and a poll watcher were killed in a fire that destroyed a schoolhouse that served as a polling center in Taysan, Batangas. Policemen believed to be working on orders of a local politician were arrested and indicted for the crime. Automation will not put an end to election-related violence; this is a job for security forces.

Also needing a thorough briefing on the new system are the political parties that are expected to be entitled to poll watchers. The Kapi-sanan ng mga Brodkasters sa Pilipinas, which will receive electronic copies of the election results in real time for dissemination to the public, also needs to be briefed on the automated system. 

Automation is not a silver bullet for all the ills besetting the Philippine electoral process. Until the new system is tested, there will always be doubts about the promise held by automation to make Philippine elections clean, orderly and credible. That promise can be realized only if citizens help make it possible, and those in the frontlines are given proper training and resources to do their job well.