More harmful proposal?

Our past elections which were manually conducted have shown us that all kinds of cheating can be committed with impunity especially in the counting and canvassing of votes. The most notorious mode resorted to by candidates out to win at any cost is the infamous “dagdag bawas” perpetrated during the canvassing of election returns. Some candidates obviously find such practice to be less tedious and less expensive than the usual vote-buying simply because they deal only with election officials involved in the canvassing rather than with the millions of voters whom they have to “convince” with monetary considerations to vote for them on Election Day and whom they are not even sure will really honor the deal. In other words, these cheaters realized that the “wholesale” mode of cheating is definitely much better and surer than the retail style of doing it where they have to deal with millions of people. “Dagdag bawas” has indeed given rise to a phenomenon where real winners in the election still turn out to be the losers in the counting and canvassing.

Since its “invention” this fraudulent electoral practice has undergone a lot of “improvement” and has been increasingly used. It has indeed placed in doubt the credibility of the election results especially in 2004 and 2007. Hence the public pressure and clamor to put a stop to it, among others, have finally forced the government to adopt the first ever automated election in this country and in this part of the world. It is believed to be the best way to satisfy the peoples’ ardent wish that their votes be counted already once they have filled up and have placed their ballots inside the ballot box in their respective precincts. To the electorate, automation simply means getting rid of canvassing and minimizing human intervention after the votes have been cast. As COMELEC Commissioner Rene V. Sarmiento hoped, “the new system will be a …vast improvement over the century old mano-mano system of elections that has spawned electoral maladies like misreading and misappreciation of the ballots, ballot switching, ballot snatching, ballot stuffing, dagdag-bawas etc”.

Unfortunately, even before they are realized, several people are already dampening and dashing the hopes of Commissioner Sarmiento and a lot of people who ardently wish to ensure that their votes are indeed “sacred and supreme”. Ironically they are the very same “concerned citizens” who staunchly advocated the automation of our elections, principally six presidential candidates, businessmen and other citizens from other sectors in society including some religious, farmers, laborers and women. They are now demanding that a “parallel manual count” be done allegedly to “restore the credibility and acceptance of the outcome of the automated elections”. They may have some valid reasons but people are somehow still perplexed on why they would like to go back to the manual counting that has been the root cause of the frauds and other anomalous practices in our past elections.

Actually they are adopting the proposal of the Information Technology (IT) community who would like the Board of Election Inspectors (BEI) to manually count all the votes cast for president, vice president and any of the local positions of governor, congressman and mayor, then compare the results with those coming from the PCOS machines. If there is a discrepancy and it is less than 1%, then the results may be transmitted electronically. If the difference is 1% or more in any of the three positions then a full manual count of all the candidates should be done. In short we go back to mano-mano.

Apparently these “concerned citizens” are now doubting the credibility of the automated elections because the COMELEC allegedly “removed many of the safeguards initially set in place like the source code review, ultra-violet mark checking, authenticity check through digital signatures etc.”

The COMELEC may have really committed some acts raising doubts on the credibility of the automated elections. Obviously our COMELEC commissioners do not really possess the technical savvy of the IT people who raised those doubts and made the proposal. Nevertheless there are also undoubtedly a lot of misgivings and fears regarding this parallel manual count.

Foremost among these fears is of course the element of human intervention. The manual count will be done by the Board of Election Inspectors (BEI). Without necessarily casting aspersions or doubting the integrity of these people, we cannot totally disregard the previous experience showing that this board is most vulnerable to the evils of electoral frauds and cheating that automation precisely seeks to avoid.

More dangerous yet is the possibility of a conflict between the automated election results and the results of the manual count. The proposal only cites discrepancies or differences of 1% or more. It does not expressly mention about the difference in the outcome spelling victory or defeat for any candidate. Hence if the winner in the automated election count is different from the winner in the manual count, which result shall be considered as official and binding for purposes of proclaiming the victorious candidate? The difference may serve as the basis of a protest but who will be the protestant and the protestee?

From the looks of it, the proposal may just end up in more confusion that may be used as the basis for the more fearsome scenario of failure of elections that we are precisely trying to avoid. More alarming here is that an additional sum of P500 million will have to be spent that may just sow more confusion due to the inconclusiveness of the results.

Of course, at this stage and in view of some questionable moves of the COMELEC, it is also good and timely to sound the alarm bells and question the credibility of the automated elections. But there must be other ways of testing this credibility. In this connection, the proposal of Atty. Koko Pimentel, Secretary General of PDP Laban to conduct the accuracy test now, not during the election seems to be more plausible and less dangerous. The COMELEC should have already automated the absentee voting of soldiers in Metro Manila in the locals instead of still using the manual system. Another missed opportunity, another questionable omission.

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