Was the automated election successful?

One news item that should have landed in the front pages of newspapers and given equal if not more prominence than the betting odds in the cruel Pacquiao-Margarito boxing bout or the intriguing love life of P-Noy is the assessment of the May 10, 2010 automated elections by former COMELEC Chairman Christian Monsod. Once more this kind of treatment has shown how warped our sense of values has become. Obviously this is the biggest factor why we have never grown as a nation. We give more importance to trivial matters and ignore the things that matter more to the building of a strong and healthy Republic.

One of the basic principles of our democratic Republic enshrined in the Constitution is that “sovereignty resides in the people and all government authority emanates from them”. The most concrete and tangible instrument to exercise that sovereignty is of course the use of the right of suffrage in the elections of our political leaders and representatives. Yet since the time we gained independence, our elections have been tainted with irregularities that put in doubt whether the real voice of the people have been heard and whether that voice have been wisely and properly conveyed for the common good and not for the good of a few. And so last May 2010 elections, we used for the first time the Automated Election System (AES) with the expectation that it will finally remove all these irregularities that put in doubt whether our elections have been honest, orderly and peaceful. But did it?

Atty. Monsod’s assessment of the last May elections provides an objective and credible answer. The report is quite long so let me just share with you pertinent portions thereof which provides useful information so that we should not “look forward contentedly to another date with history in 2013 with Smartmatic and its PCOS machines and with the same kind of Comelec governance as in 2010” “. He said in part as follows:

“Our automation was mass-produced in one step, was not really pilot-tested satisfactorily, and was provided by a supplier who had no extensive experience in the technology and seemed to be also learning while it was being implemented”….

The Comelec was advised before the elections SysTest that (1) total transparency is the key to promoting confidence and integrity in the electoral system and (2) it must remain in control of the entire election process and never permit it to become vendor-driven. And how vital it is for the Comelec to share factual information about the automation and testing processes to accurately inform the public, including groups most critical of the automation project, and to de-bunk misinformation and rumors. Unfortunately, the Comelec, (and Smartmatic) did not heed the advise….”

It soon found itself on a slippery slope as it gave up more and more decision-making powers to Smartmatic for lack of organic technical expertise. (The Comelec Advisory Council cites at least four violations of Smartmatic that should be penalized i.e. CF Card mistake, UV safeguard, time stamps, transmission underperformance.) Moreover, speed and not accuracy became the overriding consideration, even if it meant ignoring legal provisions, such as Sec. 197 of the Election Code on the right of voter to a second and third ballot, disabling the feature of a voter verified paper audit trail and dispensing with certain grounds for pre-proclamation proceedings. When the automation schedule seriously faltered, it then waived, ignored or rendered inutile certain legislated safeguards and contractual requirements and de-prioritized other electoral reforms necessary to improve the system itself. When the Comelec ran out of explanations and the questions and criticisms persisted, the Comelec simply shut down communications and thereby heightened the mutual distrust. Frustrated IT professionals and experienced election watchdogs (except PPCRV) interpreted the Comelec approach as, at the least, high-risk that put the elections in jeopardy. Or at the worst a conspiracy to make it fail or to allow cheating to take place”….

“Despite the Comelec’s lack of transparency” Atty. Monsod said that “there were bases in assuming that the source code and the PCOS machines were clean and therefore a good chance that the elections would be sufficiently credible provided 30 compensating controls recommended by the Technical Advisory Committee were installed and implemented with additional safeguards” Among the safe guards he mentioned was “an enhanced and efficient implementation of the random manual audit” (RMA) which is the “main argument of the Comelec against the parallel manual count”. Unfortunately however, he said that the RMA was a “failure” citing the following reasons:

1. The chair of the Technical Working Group (TWG)-RMA is a “statistical illiterate like me and should have realized her limitations”;

2. She compromised in the use of the RMA for the proclamation purposes against her earlier commitment in the interest of a harmonious relationship with the Comelec that “may just as well happened given the poor quality of the RMA and its delayed completion; and

3. Many were not done at the precinct, nor on election day, nor observed by the parties for lack of notice, nor were all the precincts covered of an already small sample.

According to Monsod, “the PPCRV parallel count was useless. It merely encoded 53,000 ERs equivalent to 69% accomplishment rate, the lowest in the history of parallel counts in the country.

This particular assessment is quite significant because in Quezon City alone, there are so many election protests based on RMA failure. In fact in one case in the fourth district the petitioner asked the Comelec to order a manual audit in some precincts as remedial measures. But six months after the elections, the Comelec has not yet acted on it. –Jose C. Sison (The Philippine Star)

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