The Comelec Advisory Council has spoken – poll automation, and for Comelec to take over from Total Information Management Corp. as the local counterpart of Smartmatic. Yes, Comelec must sue TIM for damages but this can be postponed as it has to gear up for this new role. Holding election in 2010 is non-negotiable even if it means storming the heavens with prayers. And, through a process that we can believe in. It is important to reassure everyone, especially those who are voting for the first time, that we are committed to installing mechanisms that would ensure an honest and credible election. One gap in this step to automation is the lack of understanding by the general public of how the process works. After the regular board meeting of the Asian Institute of Journalism, several trustees who are experts in the field, among them Dr. William Torres, National Academician for ICT and ICT Development Consultant of Mozcom, Inc. of which he was once president, noted that a need today is to help the public and electoral volunteer groups popularize the operation of a fully-automated electoral system.

Dr. Torres notes that the Optical Mark Recognition based system (OMR) which is a fully-automated system, differs from manual voting in two things – how the voters accomplish and cast their ballots; and how the votes are captured and tallied or counted. Whichever system is adopted, the transmission and canvassing of votes are expected to be automated in the same way. In OMR, the voter fills out the pre-printed ballot by making a mark on the indicated space opposite each of the candidates’ names that he is voting for. The completed ballot is fed into the OMR device which captures the marks and tallies the votes of all ballots. A desirable feature of OMR is that it is able to capture and record an electronic image of each ballot for future reference in case a recount has to be done. After the voting, the tallied results are electronically transmitted to the canvassing centers.

Two major vulnerabilities in the way Comelec plans to implement the system are that the voter is required to feed the completed ballot into the OMR device. It is possible, Torres notes, that the voter can insert something on the device that can stall or disrupt it, such as sticking a gum into a ballot. If this happens, we can expect a long queue of waiting voters while the device is being fixed. The other is that voters in 2 to 5 precincts in a voting center will be combined into one group as they will be sharing one OMR device. Managing this bigger group is much more problematic. Dr. Torres says he prefers a scheme where voters of one precinct feed their completed ballots into a locked ballot box. After the voting, the box is unlocked and the ballots fed into the OMR device in one batch. Ballots from each precincts’ ballot boxes are processed, one after another by the shared OMR. The benefits are that each OMR will have a shorter time of operation. Voters need orientation only on how to fill out the ballot. If for some reason an OMR device does not work, the voting is not disrupted. A disadvantage of the combined manual and electronic transmission and computer-assisted canvassing is that the process of keying electronic returns into a computer before transmission, becomes quite complex and difficult to manage when one considers some 250 thousand precincts and the number of operators that have to be trained and mobilized.

Even as we recognize the critical role of automation, we must remember that what is most important is what we put into the system – that the integrity of the process depends on our collective will to make it succeed – through voter education and wise choice of leaders that can manage the transformation of our society.

Mel Velarde, CEO of several ICT companies suggests use of “artificial intelligence” software that is able to analyze election returns from all precincts through texting. As a pilot project, this could be initially undertaken through contributions from independent private groups or presidential candidates. My e-mail – florangel.braid@gmail.com