On December 22, 1997, former President Fidel V. Ramos signed into law Republic Act No. 8436, which authorized the COMELEC to use an automated election system beginning with the May 11, 1998 National and Local Elections and onwards. After a partial implementation during the May 1998 elections, it is high time that the law be implemented on a nationwide scale.
When we say "modernized", we are referring to the use of computerized equipment or automated machines to accomplish the simple tasks of counting the votes from the ballots and adding the results from the municipality level up to the national level, as mandated by RA 8436.
This means that the ballots will not be counted by the teachers anymore, and the actual consolidation of votes for the canvassing procedure will not be done by a COMELEC-led team anymore. These basic mathematical procedures will now be accomplished using automated machines.
For the 2004 elections, the ballots will contain the names of all the candidates, with ovals opposite their names. Votes are cast by shading the ovals opposite the names of the candidate of your choice. There will be no more writing of names of candidates. It will be much like marking ovals corresponding to your answer on the NSAT/NCEE answer sheet.
If, for example, you shaded 13 ovals on the ballot for the SENATOR position, when you should have selected only 12, we have what is called an OVERVOTE. In the old system, if you write the names of 13 senatorial candidates on your ballot, the 13th name you wrote down will not be counted. However, in the new system, wherein the names of candidates are listed alphabetically on the ballot, the ACM has no way of knowing which was the 13th oval you shaded. In this case, therefore, the ACM will not consider any vote for the SENATOR position. However, all the other valid votes in the ballot will still be counted.
It would be the same if you vote for two presidential candidates, instead of just one. The vote for that overvoted position will be voided, while still counting all the other valid votes for the other positions.
No, there will be no ACMs at the precincts. The setup at the polling place will still be much like the manual procedure. There will still be the teachers, the voters' list, the ballot box, the voting booths and the ballots - only they will look different (as mentioned in number 4).
Upon the closing of polls, or when voting time is finished, the ballot boxes for the different precincts will be brought to a centralized counting center where an ACM will be located.
As mentioned above, ballots will not be counted at the precinct anymore by the teachers. They will be counted at a centralized counting center by an ACM.
There will be added security features at different levels, aside from the current security features in the old system:
- The ballots will be printed with a security mark.
This security mark will identify to the ACM if a ballot is genuine or if it has already been previously counted.
- The ballots will be coded per municipality.
This means that ballots intended for a specific municipality will not be counted by a machine that is assigned to another municipality. This is to safeguard against ballot snatching. For example, ballots intended for Pasay City will not be counted by an ACM assigned to Manila.
- The ACM accepts valid ballots only.
Due to the security features built into the system starting from the printing of ballots, the machine is able to recognize only valid ballots for the municipality to which it is assigned. It will reject fake or spurious ballots, including photocopied ballots.
- There will be a lesser risk in transporting ballots to the counting center.
In the manual system, ballot box snatching usually occurs during the wee hours of the night since counting is usually finished at nighttime.
In the automated system, since the ballots will not be counted at the polling place, the ballot boxes from the entire polling center would be transported simultaneously to the counting centers, with escorts, immediately after the closing of polls at around 3:00 to 5:00 PM.
- Immediate printing of the Election Returns.
Immediately after all the ballots for one precinct have passed through the ACM for counting, the Election Returns for the precinct would be printed out, also by the ACM, with just one push of a button. Copies will still be distributed to the political parties.
In the much publicized "Dagdag-Bawas" operation in 1995, subject of a case filed by Senator Aquilino Pimentel, there were instances of adding a "0" to the end of a vote in the election reports, say "100", to make it "1000", or putting a "1" at the beginning to make it "1100".
In the new system, this can not be done by the machine since all it is programmed to do is to increment, or add, a vote for a candidate by "1" every time it encounters a shaded oval in the ballot corresponding to that candidate's name.
- Computerized accumulation of results.
The machine automatically adds the appropriate votes in each ballot to the total votes received by each candidate, as each ballot passes through the ACM.
The overall total of votes per candidate for all the ballots that are read by the machine can automatically be computed, with a corresponding printout of the result. This eliminates "dagdag-bawas" altogether because this is an automatic procedure. "Dagdag-bawas" happened due to the manual addition of a digit to a figure, either in the beginning or at the end.
- Printed audit trail report.
Each transaction on the machine is logged and printed out, with date and time stamps for actions, such as starting or stopping the machine, printing results, how many ballots read, reasons for stoppages, and the like.
- Minimum human intervention.
Human intervention is limited to telling the machine to:
- count the ballots,
- save the results to a CD, and
- print the results.
That's it! Appreciation of ballots is entirely done by the machine. It is no longer possible to add a digit before or after a totaled number of votes. The machine operator cannot tell the machine to credit the vote of a candidate to another, or to increase or decrease a candidate's vote because it's just NOT what it is programmed to do.
One of the causes of the delay in proclamation of winning candidates is pre-proclamation controversy, including complaints regarding appreciation of the ballots, which include allegations of mis-reading of candidate names during counting, and of mis-calculating the results, either intentionally or unintentionally. With the use of a modernized election system, these procedures, which are very prone to human error, are delegated to machines which cannot be told to favor a certain candidate over another. The ACM is actually a dumb machine which only knows how to add a "1" for every shaded oval it sees on a ballot that corresponds to a candidate name. With this, cause for filing of pre-proclamation protest cases is greatly minimized.
In relation to this, winning candidates at the municipal level are forecasted to be known after a maximum of 2 days, at the provincial level, after a maximum of 5 days, and at the national level after a maximum of 7 days, including travel time from the lower to the higher canvassing levels.
Before the ACMs are accepted by the COMELEC as government property, they have to pass rigorous testing for accuracy by the Department of Science and Technology (DOST), as witnessed by representatives from the COMELEC, the Senate and the House of Representatives. Afterwards, until before election day, the COMELEC will engage in massive information campaign to inform the public regarding the new system. Moreover, three days before election day, the machines will be sealed after a certification for accuracy has been signed by political party representatives, as mandated by law.
Aside from the issue of cost, the law specifically prescribes the use of an Optical Mark Sense (OMR), or similar, technology for the modernized election system to be acquired by COMELEC - one which uses paper ballots for voting purposes.
A touch-screen machine is a voting machine, which would require the installation of at least one machine at the precinct. This would eventually replace the usual voting booths. In the current system, the COMELEC places 10 voting booths in the precinct so that 10 people can vote simultaneously. If one touch-screen machine costs, for example, 100,000 pesos, and there are 200,000 precincts nationwide, and there should be 10 machines in each, just compute how much that would cost! The current ACMs that the COMELEC will acquire will total to 1,991 machines nationwide, since they will be allocated on a per-municipality basis, at a rate of one for every 16,000 to 20,000 registered voters.
The election system in Florida that had a problem was a punch card system, wherein holes are punched on a ballot to indicate the votes for selected candidates, just like a bus conductor punching holes on your bus ticket. The problem came in when the chad, or the punched out portion on the ballot did not come off, thereby "confusing" the punch card readers on whether there is vote or not. The OMR technology, which the law provides, is a different technology which involves the shading of ovals opposite the names of the candidates of choice.
The possibility of ballots switching and ballot box snatching is always present. The COMELEC cannot promise to solve all the problems of the electoral process by acquiring counting machines that know how to count and consolidate votes accurately, reliably, and in a faster manner. What the new system cannot address have to be addressed in another way. However, with the new system, we can lessen the usual ills that some crafty people have the habit of ingeniously coming up with during elections.
When ballots are switched, they are usually replaced with fake ones - which can be detected by the ACM. Ballot boxes are usually snatched when certain candidates have knowledge that they are losing in certain precincts, and during the wee hours of the night. However, this time, they will not know, at the precinct level, how they fared in the election since the ballots are not counted there. Moreover, ballot boxes would be transported, after the closing of the polls, while there is still daylight, at around 3:00 to 5:00 PM, in plain sight of every one.
As mentioned above, this scam is no longer possible. The machine operator cannot tell the machine to credit the vote of a candidate to another, or to increase or decrease a candidate's vote because it's just NOT what the ACM is programmed to do. And with the rigorous test that the DOST has put in place, and with the help of well-meaning non-government organizations, such as the Philippine Computer Society, any glitches in the program, if any, will certainly be detected. And we must not forget the final test on the ACM, which the political parties and candidates themselves will have to participate in, and in which they have certify to its accuracy before they seal it prior to actual use on election day.
With the dissemination of election results being immediately available on-site at the centralized counting center, and with the dominant majority and minority political parties, including the accredited citizen's arm still being provided copies of the results, the paper trail is long and virtually everywhere. Any deviation from the true count, if any, will easily be traceable.
With so much safeguards in place, and with the help of the vigilant Filipino voter, this modernized election system will give the country the most accurate vote counting and consolidation it has ever seen.
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