MAJOR CHANGES FROM THE MANUAL SYSTEM^*

      As implemented in the 1996 Pilot Test and 1998 Partial Implementation in the ARMM, the following were the major changes from the manual system of voting, counting and canvassing of votes:

1. no writing of names
   
   
2. ballots are not counted in the polling place
   but in the centralized municipal or provincial counting center
   
   
3. there are added security features at different levels
   aside from the previous securities
   
   
4. minimum human intervention

All candidates' names are pre-printed on the ballot. All the voter would have to do to indicate his vote is to shade the oval corresponding to the name of the candidate of his choice.       The act of voting would be easier, and voting time per voter would be greatly diminished.       This would also be beneficial for the illiterate voter since it would be easier to memorize and sight-read the name of his chosen candidate, and just shade the oval corresponding to it. Click here to see a full sample ballot

      After the closing of the polls, the ballots will be brought to the centralized counting center to be counted by the machines.

      Traditionally, after the closing of the polls, the ballots are read and counted by the Board of Election Inspectors (BEI), mainly composed of public school teachers, at the precinct level in the polling place. Depending on the number of oppositions and protests during the counting, this procedure could extend up to the wee hours of the night until early morning. The BEI would already be very exhausted by this time.

      In the new system, the BEI would not have to do the counting of the ballots. They would just have to transport them to the counting center, where the ballots would be read by the machine in their order of arrival.
 

      Aside from the usual built-in securities in the current manual system, there would be additional security features in the following levels:

1. printing of ballots:

         Aside from the presence of watchers and security personnel during the printing of the ballots, and the verification of ballots afterwards:

   
   
   • timing track per municipality;
          i.e. ballots are coded per municipality

           Ballots taken from another municipality would be rejected by the machine assigned to a specific municipality only. This is to safeguard against the ill effects of ballots snatching.
     
     

   • combination of type of paper and ink used

           The machine is set to recognize a specific type of paper and ink used in printing the ballots. This is to safeguard against the use of fabricated ballots by unscrupulous individuals in ballots switching.

   
   
   
2. shipment:

         There is 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 would not be counted at the polling place, the ballot boxes from the entire polling center would be transported simultaneously to the counting centers, still with escorts, immediately after the closing of polls, which is around 3:00 to 5:00 PM.
   
   
   

3. counting and canvassing:
   
   
   • machine accepts valid ballots only

           Due to the securities built into the system starting from the printing of ballots, the machine is able to recognize only valid ballots for the municipality or groups of municipality to which it is assigned. It would reject ballots whose paper and ink used would not match to its specifications, including photocopied ballots.
     
     

   • reading error rate of 1/10M ballots

           This is the result of a test conducted by an independent US company, Wyle Laboratories.
     
           This would roughly mean that the machine has a chance of reading one ballot wrong for every 10 million ballots that passes through it. Considering 40 million voters nationwide, if only one machine would read all 40 million ballots, there is a chance that it would misread only 4 ballots.
     
           This is a very small error rate as compared to the manual system of counting balltos, where reading errors of a candidate's name written on the ballot could either be inadvertent due to sheer exhaustion on the part of the person reading the ballot, or deliberate to favor a certain candidate.
     
           In practice, to meet the target date of finishing the municipal count in 24 hours, one machine would be assigned to at least one municipality, or to an area with roughly 10,000 registered voters.
     
     

   • immediate printing of results after each precinct

           Immediately after all the ballots for one precinct have passed through the machine for reading, the result would be printed out by the machine with just one push of a button. This report would be equivalent to the Election Returns. Copies would 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" in the beginning to make it "1100".
     
           In the new system, that would not be done by the machine since all it is programmed to do is to increment 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 votes in each ballot is automatically added by the machine to the total votes garnered per candidate as each ballot passes through the machine.
     
           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

           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.

      Human intervention is limited to telling the machine to:

• start and stop counting the ballots,
  
  
• start saving the results in a diskette
       (or any data storage device), and
  
  
• start printing the results.

Appreciation of ballots is entirely done by the machine.

      There is no more venue for adding a digit before or after a totalled 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.