Acclaim for the automated election

PERIODICALLY, POLLSTERS have the pleasure of announcing good news, which offsets the pain, roughly as periodic, of announcing news not so good.

One of the good days was Wednesday (July 28), when Social Weather Stations reported high acclaim for the country’s first use of the automated election system (AES), based on its June 2010 national surveys of voting-age adults (voters, for short) and of teachers who served as election inspectors (poll workers, for short).

The favorability of the news quite exceeded the hopes of the report-reactors, Commissioner Gregorio Y. Larrazabal, of the Commission on Elections, and Ambassador Henrietta de Villa, national chairperson of the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV). Their profuse thanks go to the Filipino people. SWS was simply a collector and conveyor of the evaluations.

General satisfaction. In the new survey of voters, 75 percent said they were satisfied with the general conduct of the May 2010 elections—compared to only 51 percent satisfied with the May 2007 election, as surveyed in June 2007, and 53 percent satisfied with the May 2004 election, as surveyed in June 2004. (Note that SWS draws a fresh random sample for every new survey.)

In the new survey of poll workers, 90 percent were satisfied with the general conduct of the 2010 elections—much higher than the already decent 78 percent satisfied with the May 2007 elections among poll workers surveyed in June 2007. (For any election, it’s but natural that poll workers, being personally involved, are more generous graders than the general public.)

Public satisfaction with institutions. The election-concerned institution with the highest rate of public satisfaction (“very satisfied” + “somewhat satisfied’) was the Board of Election Inspectors. The BEI got 86 percent for “ensuring clean and orderly voting.”

The satisfaction percentages of other institutions were: Philippine National Police, 84; Armed Forces of the Philippines, 82; Comelec, 77, for “proclaiming as winners those who truly got the most votes”; PPCRV, 74, for “honest reporting of the vote count”; Smartmatic, 70; and the Legal Network for Truthful Elections, 66, for “guarding the canvass of votes in municipalities and provinces.” For no institution did dissatisfaction exceed 10 percent; quite a few respondents felt neutral.

Believability of the election results. Here are percentages of voters (in parentheses, the year surveyed) who called the official results for the stated races VERY and SOMEWHAT believable:

Very Believable Somewhat Believable

President 71 24

Vice President 63 29

Senators (2010) 57 36

Senators (2007) 35 45

My congressman (2010) 62 29

My congressman (2007) 44 40

Thus the percentage believing the official results rose from 80 in 2007 to 93 in 2010 with respect to the senatorial race, and from 83 in 2007 to 91 in 2010 with respect to the congressional races.

Among voters, 65 percent agreed, and 13 percent disagreed, that the use of PCOS machines lessened cheating in the counting of votes; among poll workers, 94 percent agreed and only 2 percent disagreed with the statement.

But other irregularities continued. Voters who had personally witnessed vote-buying were 15 percent in June 2010, compared to 13 percent in June 2007. Flying voters were seen by 3 percent in 2010, versus 2 percent in 2007. Harassment of voters was seen by 2 percent in both 2010 and 2007.

Three percent saw the use of violence on election day, and 3 percent saw cases of bribing not to vote. These irregularities had not been probed before.

Problems. Seventy-one percent of voters surveyed complained of long lines and a long wait before they could vote. This was confirmed by reports from the poll workers showing an increase in the number of voters who had difficulty finding their names in the registry.

The median number of voters needing assistance from poll workers was 6-10 per polling place in 2010, compared to only 1-2 in 2007. Eight percent of the poll workers in 2010 said they were harassed, compared to only 3 percent in 2007. In 2010, their main harassers were (impatient) voters; in 2007 their main harassers were poll-watchers.

Thirty-nine percent of the poll workers had problems operating the PCOS machines (main problem, jammed paper), while 45 percent had problems transmitting the counts using the PCOS machines (mainly, weak signal). Nevertheless, 57 percent favored using the AES in future elections, and 13 percent favored it but with fewer voters per precinct.

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The SWS national survey of June 25-28, 2010 had the usual sample size of 1,200 adults, drawn from 240 random spots around the country, with one person randomly drawn from each of five random households per spot.

For each of the 240 spots, SWS obtained a list of the public school teachers who were on the local BEIs, and randomly drew two of them—a chairman and a poll clerk who served in the same polling center, if possible—to form a random national sample of 480 poll workers. These poll workers were interviewed on June 23 to July 2, 2010. The consequent sampling error margins are about 3 percent for the survey of adults and 5 percent for the survey of poll workers.

The 2007 survey of poll workers, on the other hand, had 302 random spots, with about three workers randomly drawn per spot, for a national sample of 903 (for an error margin of about 3.3 percent), thanks to a larger research budget at that time. The present and past surveys of adults and poll workers are from an electoral reform project sponsored by The Asia Foundation. –Mahar Mangahas, Philippine Daily Inquirer

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Contact SWS: www.sws.org.ph or mahar.mangahas@sws.org.ph.