Duterte and Congress: Stop automated-election sleaze!
claim to be lacking in knowledge about the hybrid AES, here’s a quick primer on the system. Its procedures, advantages and safeguards have long been detailed in countless Congress hearings, and there are many working systems around the world.
THEY WERE fiRST PRESENTED OVER A dozen years ago when legislators were deliberating the election law that mandated automated elections in 2010. At the time, hybrid polls would have cost P2 billion while the 2009 Smartmatic contract price was P7.2 billion.
One well-functioning hybrid system is the one in Germany, where the constitutional court rightly and wisely ruled in 2009 that ordinary citizens, not just computer experts, must be able to see and verify the actual tallying of their votes.
Smartmatic does not allow Filipinos to physically check if their votes are properly counted, except in the so-called random manual audit, or RMA, done in fewer than 800 precincts, less than 1 percent of the more than 80,000 voting places.
(In its utterly wrongheaded RMA procedure, Comelec selected where audits would be done three days before elections, enabling fraudsters to avoid those precincts.)
In the hybrid system, voters fiLL OUT BALLOTS WITH THEIR CHOICES, which are tabulated by hand, closely monitored by inspectors of rival candidates and civil society poll watchers, who can raise objections and question tallies.
Depending on the budget for facilities, votes are marked down with pens on whiteboards or tallied in electronic spreadsheets projected on screens from laptop computers. The counting by whiteboard or spreadsheet can be streamed online and on video screens for public viewing.
After counting, election returns are signed by ink or digitally, then transmitted to Comelec, city and provincial canvassing centers, the accredited pollwatch organization and the transparency server accessible to media, political parties and other authorized entities. All returns can also be scanned and posted online.
With access to every precinct count, any group can verify canvassing tabulations. This will deter dagdag-bawas, which can be debunked with publicly accessible returns.
For sure, manual counting takes much longer than instant VCM tabulation, perhaps a whole daylonger. But one day’s delay is a small price to pay for full transparency and the citizens’ validation of ballot tallies with our own eyes, rather than just having to hope that VCMs are counting votes and transmitting results correctly.
With Comelec schemers sure to take down politicians opposing it, even national leaders may be reluctant to move against the system, There is also the temptation to just exploit it for election victory and even the ratification of constitutional amendments pushed by the administration. That’s why Filipinos must loudly oppose Smartmatic.
May President Duterte and the Filipino people do what’s needed for TRUE DEMOCRACY TO fiNALLY TRIUMPH IN our elections. So help us God.