MANILA, Philippines — The hard work put up by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) and its systems provider Smartmatic-Total Information Management Corp. to make the May, 2010 automated polls a success has been cited by an American-led poll observation mission.

The Carter Center, in its 70-page final report on last year’s Philippine elections, particularly cited the balloting which was “marked by relatively high public confidence and trust in the use of the optical mark recognition technology.”

“Such a success is a credit to the hard work of Comelec and Smartmatic as well as the commitment of the people of the Philippines toward increasingly transparent elections,” it said in its final report which was released recently.

The report also includes recommendations for further enhancing popular backing for computerized voting, including the overhaul of the 1985 Omnibus Election Code to clear the way for “a single, comprehensive electoral law that fully considers and integrates provisions for automation” and responds to the country’s “changing electoral structure and use of automated voting.”

“The creation of a comprehensive election law encompassing the amendments regarding electoral technology would improve the transparency and efficiency of future election processes,” said Carter Center, a veteran of 80 election observation missions in 30 countries since its inception nearly 30 years ago.

“As Comelec becomes more familiar with running an automated election, the body should take specific and measured steps to build institutional capacity around the implementation of the AES(automated election system),” the Carter Center proposed.

This, aside from training the Comelec commissioners and BEI officials in electronic voting technology as this will help increase public confidence in their ability to administer automated elections.

The Carter Report also recommended the following: providing “adequate time” in future electoral calendars for the implementation of all stages of automation, increasing the number of polling stations and dividing larger clustered precincts to minimize delays in the voting process; and encouraging poll candidates and political parties to participate in pre-election AES review and testing to further bolster public confidence in, and increase public awareness and understanding of, the AES system.

Meanwhile, the international effort organized by the Carter Center was described in the Carter Report as a “limited technical election observation mission” because instead of covering all aspects of the elections, its baseline survey was focused only on automated election technology and its impact on the Philippine electoral process.

It was the third such technical observation mission organized by the Carter Center, following its earlier delegations that observed the national elections in Venezuela in 2006 and in the US in 2008.

The observers in the 2010 Philippine mission were Michael Hunter, Duncan Osborn, Karthik Rangarajan of the Georgia Institute of Technology; Karen Ogle and Joyce Pitso of the Electoral Institute for the Sustainability of Democracy in Africa (South Africa); and Peter Wolf of the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (Austria).

Alongside its six-member observation delegation, the Philippine mission had a technical team and staff that conducted field work for three months during the preelection and postelection periods from March to June last year.

Founded in 1982 by former US President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn in partnership with Emory University, the primary goal of the Carter Center is to advance peace and health worldwide.