Automated Election for 2010???

Is automated election the answer for a clean and honest election? Is it credible? Is Philippines ready for it?… These are some of the queries whirling inside my mind when automated election brought into topic. Elections in the Philippines have always been a manual process with the results for national positions often being announced more than a month after election day, but this coming May 2010 it will shift into automated election. An attempt to rectify this was done by the Commission on Elections by automating the process of counting the votes.

What is Automated Election System?

Automated election system (AES) is a system that uses appropriate technology to accomplish and aid such tasks as voting, counting, consolidating, canvassing, and transmission of election result, and other electoral process. Republic Act No. 9369, which is the Amended Elections Automation Law provides for the use of two forms of AES. The first is a paper-based election system defined as “a type of automated election system that uses paper ballots, records and counts votes, tabulates, consolidates, canvasses and transmits electronically the results of the vote count.” It uses the Optical Mark Reader (OMR) Technology. Here, the voters have to shade the oval which corresponds to their candidate of choice using pencil in a specially scanned paper ballot. It is composed of 2 Laptops, 2 Digital Scanners, 2 card readers, 1 hub and 1 printer. The votes in the shaded ballots will then be scanned and counted using an Automated Counting Machine (ACM). This kind of technology is pretty much familiar in the Philippines.
The second form is the Direct Recording Electronic (DRE). It is defined as “a type of automated election system that uses electronic ballots, records votes by means of a ballot display provided with mechanical or electro-optical components that can be activated by the voter, processes data by means of a computer program, records voting data and ballot images, and transmits voting results electronically.” voters are provided with a Voting Pad where the photos of candidates can be selected by pressing on the desired picture. Once the vote is final, a receipt is generated after pressing ‘BOTO‘. However, DRE Technology can only be deployed in areas where communications is available and reliable. These technologies proved that IT in the Philippines is fastly growing and developing.

Who will provide?…

This new system of voting will not be implemented without the technology need to run the whole system. The Smartmatic, a world-class leading supplier of electoral solutions and services, won the bid to carry out the 2010 Election project in the Philippines. The contract was worth approximately $150 million, that Smartmatic is to deploy 82,200 SAES1800 voting machines across a sizable proportion of the 7,107 thousand islands comprising the territory of the Philippines, and transmit all results electronically to over 1,700 canvassing and consolidation centers. Smartmatic has successfully deployed its electronic voting technology in multiple electoral processes in the United States, Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia, accurately counting over 150 million votes, always with the provision of an auditable paper trail, and open source-code reviews. Last year, the Smartmatic electoral technology was used in the election in the ARMM region in the Philippines, an event the COMELEC regarded as very satisfactory, and first of its kind in South East Asia. Smartmatic is a multinational company that designs and deploys technological solutions aimed at helping governments fulfill, in the most efficient way, their commitments with their citizens. It is one of the largest cutting-edge technology suppliers, with a wide and proven experience in the United States, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Automated election has several advantages, some of these are: Financial Savings, though automated elections deal with computers and will cost large amount of money, it will still cut the cost, like labor cost. Since computer will do the counting, it means fewer laborer needed. Another advantage is, increased speed and effiency of electoral task and results. Using computers would make the voting and the counting faster and acccurate than manual process of election. It has also improved capacity to identify and prevent frauds., tampering of votes will prevented and the integrity of the election would be higher. There are so many advantages but the question is, Are Filipinos ready for this?

Even automated election provide high security, there are still computer geeks that can bombard the whole system or hack the computers and manipulate the results. There is also a possibility that cheaters would come from the people who developed the system. And wee can’t deny the fact that some Filipinos doesn’t know how to use computers especially in the rural area, will they be able to adapt this new process? In my own opinion, the main problem with automated election is “transparency”. People won’t able to see the actual process of counting the votes and several will doubt if the results are really correct.

Our country might be a long way to go from being industrialized and fully prepared to reap the benefits of Information Techbology in every major part of our everyday lives, but the conduct of the 2010 automated elections is a still a big step forward towards the achievement of a truly democratic and honest elections and the closure of the digital divide as a whole. Our infrastructures might not be at par to other countries and our people might not be fully informed and trained yet, but these shortcomings can be greatly remedied if we are equipped with the willingness to learn and adapt to our ever-changing world.