And the winner is...

MANILA, Philippines - In elections past, as a roving polling precinct watcher of the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV), I remember going from school to school observing the teachers counting and tabulating the results. Voting ended at 3 pm. The sun was high when counting started, but it would be pitch dark when the Board of Election Inspectors (BEI) closed their books and packed up.

The teachers would open each ballot, read out each name while someone would dutifully notch a mark on a huge tally sheet pasted on the wall. Sometimes, the teachers would have long discussions trying to decipher a voter’s penmanship (some of which looked like Cyrillic or maybe even Chinese or Japanese characters!) or whether the misspelled name was acceptable as a vote for a particular candidate or not. 

After hours of reading out and tallying the ballots, the teachers would then manually write out eight copies of the election returns (ER), the consolidated count of the votes on the huge tally sheet. 

One of my most vivid memories of past elections is seeing my mother, PPCRV national chair Ambassador Henrietta de Villa, on national television, running after some men who snatched a ballot box from a polling precinct in Barira, Sharif Kabunsuan in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). She almost got punched in the face for her efforts!  

In the old manual method, it can be a long, difficult and sometimes even dangerous mission to transmit the ballots and election returns. The ER and Statement of Votes would be physically transported from the polling precincts to the municipal/city board of canvassers. From there the Certificates of Canvass would be brought to the provincial board of canvassers, and then sent to the National Board of Canvassers comprised of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) and Congress. With the automated election system (AES) to be used this May, voting ends at 6 p.m, at which time the voting software will be switched off in the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machine, meaning the PCOS machine will no longer accept and read ballots.

The software for counting and consolidating the votes will then be activated in the PCOS machine. This is expected to take not more than 15 minutes. Once the PCOS machine has counted and consolidated all the votes earlier fed into and read by it, the PCOS machine will print the first eight copies of the Election Returns. It will then be time to transmit the voting results.

Under the AES, the election returns are transmitted once the PCOS machine goes online. Transmission can be done via landline, cellular phone or satellite to all the destinations as per the manual system (such as the municipal/city and provincial boards of canvassers) while simultaneously transmitting to the Comelec central back-up server and another server for the dominant majority and minority parties, the accredited citizens’ arm and the Kapisanan ng mga Brodkaster sa Pilipinas (KBP). 

There will be a secured public website which will post the ERs that anyone can use to make their own quick count. In this website, the details of which will be given at a later date, one can navigate down to the precinct level and see how many votes each candidate got. 

Transmission via the AES will only take from two to five minutes. This is also the only time during which the PCOS machine is online, thus minimizing the time hackers may infiltrate the system.

After transmission, an additional 22 ERs will be printed. These ERs can then be compared against the first eight ERs printed, for an actual record of ERs before and after transmission. If the pre- and post-transmission ERs are identical, it means that the count was not manipulated while the PCOS was online and transmitting.

In past elections, the suspense would ride high as the votes trickled in ever so slowly. I would keep my television on and listen to commentators who would analyze exit poll numbers until the wee hours of the morning. I even went to La Salle Greenhills to watch the Namfrel Quick Count. 

The winners of local government positions would be proclaimed ahead of the national positions. Proclamations ranged from a few days in the local level to several weeks in the national level. 

In the AES, Comelec can proclaim winners of the local government positions once 80 percent of the local votes are counted. This is estimated to take just a few hours after the polls close. 

For the national positions, Congress has the privilege of proclaiming the winners. They have yet to determine whether they will use the manual or automated canvass. We may, however, find out who our new president will be even before he is officially proclaimed, by virtue of the secured public website.

Editor’s note: Every Sunday until the Sunday before election day, we will run articles on the different aspects of the Automated Election System to be used in the May 10 polls, including the system itself and the machine, how to vote, what to do and what not to do, the citizen’s role, and others. This series is an initiative of STARweek in cooperation with non-partisan groups such as the PPCRV, and does not involve any politician or political party. Readers may send in questions and comments by email to [email protected].