2010 Automated Election

AUTOMATION ON 2010?

Philippine Election 2010 Computerization is one of the subject that has been discussed today. And as read articled and search the I had knew that the COMELEC has received 7 proposal from different companies with their technical and commercial offer. And now the question that I have in mind is, are we Filipinos ready for the Philippine Election 2010 Computerization?, Some may say “Yes, we can.” and some may argue that we cannot do it. But I believe that we have to make it on a level by level approach. As an example the COMELEC should implement it first with Luzon or either NCR, just to make trial for this kind of system. I don’t think it will be easy to make it in the whole country with in the remaining time which is less than a year of preparation. I know that there are no such perfect program that cannot be hacked (we, as an IT student should already knew that.). As of this time it is still impossible to have a perfect system. But at least they can make the system with high security that it will be impossible for a hacker to do it on a specified time. For my opinion, the government should try to do the automation and be automated. We are already in the computer stage; let’s make use of the technology for our benefits. I would prefer to have a computerized election and counting rather than having a manual counting that will take weeks just to know the winner. The implementation of the automated polls in 2010 will definitely make the election faster, easier and more accurate, if it done properly. However, we have yet to prove its effectiveness and efficiency upon its implementation. Thus, we need to consider some points. First, it must be implemented with safeguards against anomalies. Second is the accessibility of the technology to all. Third, the process of submission and retrieval of data must be confidential and confined to the proper officials who will cast the votes. I may support for any type of poll automation as long as it would reduce fraud and speed up the election. Also we might prevent the manipulation of the votes. If you just think there is always a possibility of fraud in any whichever system they prefer to use, either in manual or automated elections in 2010. With automation, we will drastically minimize the impact of human intervention in the process. And the automation will definitely speed up the electoral process. Election in the precinct level counting done within an hour, at the local level are expected to come out within a day and those at the national level would be known in about two days only. The government had already spent money for this automation project. The COMELEC has asked for Php 11.3 billion for the cost of funding this project. But how can we make this system easy to use. Many countries had gone with this kind of election system and they experience some problems implementing this. In Florida they had designed a voting machine which led to 13%not casting their vote for their desired representative. The touch-screen interface was inconsistent, leading to confusion and a phenomenon known as “banner blindness” (def. The tendency of web visitors to ignore banner ads, even when banners contain information visitors are actively seeking.). In Finland, the lack of clear instructions and once again, a poorly designed process led to 232 voters (out of 12,234) not finishing the voting process. These voters failed to notice that they had to “validate” their votes after making their picks. These numbers may not seem significant. But if you’re running a nationwide election, with millions of votes to process, these errors will increase in scale. Imagine the situation here in the Philippines, as election sore losers and naysayers have yet another reason to keep the new officials from simply getting down to business. Although, we automate the elections it does not mean all problems on manual system will go away. However, if we look at the experience of the United States and other countries who automated their elections, the old problem still persists and new problem crop up. An election watchdog has urged the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to conduct an audit of the results of the August 11 poll in the Autonomous Region for Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), which is the first to be automated in the history of the COMELEC. They said the use of optical mark readers (OMR) and direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines in the ARMM election does not guarantee an error-free electoral exercise. Errors in automated elections systems : Machine problems cited in the EIRS database include uninitialized machines, uncounted/lost votes, candidates/choices reverses, contests not counted, wrong winner comes out, voting more than once, votes exceeding total number of voters, negative votes and unauthorized software replacement. Also software errors, hardware errors, environmental stresses, human errors, poor/flawed design and even malicious tampering could account for the persistence of errors in automated elections systems. • Uninitialized machines - meant voting machines failed to produce "zero count" printouts when the polling places opened. This is the electronic equivalent of ballot boxes stuffed with ballots even before the voting has started • Uncounted/lost votes - votes were simply "lost" or uncounted while in some cases, whole contests were not being counted. To minimize errors in the actual count, vendors (such as Smartmatic-SAHI) should use technology to enhance the transparency of the counting process by printing hard copies of the election returns. Precinct results should be posted on the Internet while maintaining the public count at the precinct level. COMELEC should consider using double-entry accounting methods for election tallies, which is usually used by businesses to balance its books. He said using double-entry accounting methods during elections would be more expensive and time-consuming but would also allow post-election auditing and help authorities detect canvassing fraud more easily. Automation will minimize problems usually encountered during elections, it does not guarantee a fraud-free election. More than a technological problem, election fraud is really a social problem and therefore calls for social solutions, supported by technological means. The only effective social solution to fraud in elections is eternal vigilance and punishment for the cheats. I really up to us if this coming automated election would work. We also need to cooperate for us to secure our votes are counted!

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