Mr. Dimpz Blog

How the Philippines Can in Lead Election Automation?

If the Philippine government ever gets down to automating elections in the Philippines, it has a chance to show the rest of the world how to do it. That’s because there’s already a lot of established “wisdom”, and the mistakes of other countries to learn from.

Ready for 2010?

In short, by looking from the mistakes of other countries, Philippine election officials can learn how to run automated elections properly. Primarily by designing election machines that make sense to the average Filipino voter, and relying on the results of sustained testing for any necessary revisions to the system.
Unfortunately, since the need for testing is crucial—unless you consider chaos on Election Day acceptable—a properly automated election system may not be ready by 2010. Yet no matter how clear the benefits of automated elections are for Philippine politics, it’s more important to get things right the first time. That’s much better than coming out with a system that will provide election automation critics with more ammunition.


Automated 2010 Elections, all set

The Commission on Elections, after a month long bidding, will award the P11.3 billion contract for the automation of 2010 elections probably this week.
Comelec’s Special Bids and Awards Committee (SBAC) chairman Ferdinand Rafanan said they will make the SBAC report and its recommendation to the Commission en banc. The awarding of contract will be upon the decision of the en banc whether they will approve it or not.
“We are all systems go for 2010 poll automation,” Rafanan added.
The SBAC will make a recommendation for Smartmatic-Total Information Management, the bidder capable for the 2010 automation project.
The SBAC Technical Working Group did the technical evaluation and finished them last Saturday.
Smartmatic-TIM consortium successfully passed all 26 technical criteria, however, there are still few documents that must be verified for post qualification of eligibility of documents.
In terms of figures, Smartmatic-TIM only bid for P7.191 billion, P4 billion below the total contract amount.
“The P4 billion will go to Comelec savings. Those are only figures and will only be disposed by the Department of Budget and Management for approved projects,” said Rafanan.

The Advantages of Voting Online or automated election

* Saved Ballot Templates eliminate the need to configure elections from scratch. Just do it once, then save that ballot configuration, and in subsequent years, specify only the names of the candidates.

* Reduced costs are enjoyed when the expenses of printing and mailing paper ballots are lessened or even eliminated.

* Email Solicitation adds value by soliciting an email address from voters without one already on record.

* Email Reminders helps increase voter participation by reminding those who’ve not voted to do so.

* Email Validation brings added value to your online election ensuring the validity of your voters’ email addresses.

* Ballot Scrubbing ensures no ballot is spoiled due to anything not in compliance with your voting rules.

* Ballot Shuffling randomly orders the candidates’ names on each request of the ballot so all candidates get a fair chance at prime name placement on the ballot. Shuffling may be enabled on some positions and not others.

* On-demand Paper Ballots simplify hybrid elections by allowing an election administrator to generate a voter-specific paper ballot that honors all the election settings just as web ballots do.

* Automated Tallying removes human fallibility from the tabulation and delivers the results within seconds of the close of the election.

* Comprehensive Reporting instantly provides you with informative day-by-day statistics about your election beyond just who won, demonstrated at the Sample Election Results page.

* Archived Election Results means all previous election results are readily available without having to dig through old records.

* Ability to correct mistakes allows candidate selections to be altered prior to final ballot submission.

The Disadvantages of having an Automated Election

Tallying is done at the city/municipal level. Ballot boxes leave precincts without voters knowing results at the precinct level
• Ballot box switching is possible

• Tallying is internal and voters will not be able to trace to the source

• There may be cases where more entries are marked in a ballot than are allowed. It will be difficult to fairly resolve issues arising from this situation.

• On the other hand, there may also be cases when there are less markings on the ballot. It is very easy to add markings in such cases.

• To achieve high quality readability, it is currently required that the ballot paper be of thicker substance and should not be folded. This means new ballot boxes will need to be designed and produced, adding to the cost.


My opinion on automated election this coming 2010:


Having this Automated Election this coming 2010 has advantages and disadvantages. Automated election could somehow help the smoothen the process of the election and easier and not so complicated when it comes to vote counting. It will ensure faster results than the manual counting thus winners will be proclaimed in less than a time. The Proposal for having an automated election is good in the sense that is fast and accurate.
It will be easier to determine who will be put in the position. It will also be an advantage on the part of voters because the voting system is organized. It will also bring out the result faster. And automated election will decrease fraud and more or les other forms of stealing and buying votes. But it has also its disadvantages; it is very costly because service provider here in invests a lot to insure that this technology will really work. It will also create hard work for government to send and pay people to of course educate people on how to participate and use this kind of election process and it’s not that easy. Because not all of Filipino voters are engaged and introduced to computer technology. This will not also ensure 100 percent accuracy and righteous counting of votes because there is still human intervention in this process.


References:

http://electionwatch.ph/
http://www.electionsonline.us/advantages.htm
http://www.transparentelections.ph/site/content/view/19/38/
http://technogra.ph/20090303/sections/editorial/how-the-philippines-can-in-lead-election-automation/