Issue voter receipts, bishops urge Comelec
More food for thought from visionary
architect-urban planner Felino Palafox
Jr.:
“The Philippines is 400 times the size of Singapore, 350 times that of Hong Kong, eight times Taiwan, three times South Korea. In the 1930s to 1970s our country was in Asia second only to Japan. Asian countries saw Manila then with highest potential for development as financial center. Manila became the seat of the Asian Development Bank.
“Then what happened? Corruption, criminality, climate change, poverty, pollution, incompetence, too much politics quickly brought us down. Urgent concerns were not addressed: education, environment, infrastructures, law enforcement, Protectionist laws and bureaucratic red tape made us globally uncompetitive.
“Progressive countries/ cities like Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, UAE stimulate development. Our country is over-regulated, yet favors only the rich, powerful, and well connected. Growth and development exclusively are for a few. Why? Even foreign investors notice only a few names being awarded major infrastructure construction projects.”
For three elections now, computer experts have been dissing the votecounting machines of Venezuelan monopoly supplier Smartmatic. Reliability of the gadgets is doubtful. Worse, the Comelec ignores the safeguards set by the Election Automation Act of 2008. Worries abound that the multibillionpeso thingamajigs can be used to cheat a close presidential contest.
Sensing things coming to a head, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines is striving to intervene. Election 2016 not only must be honest, orderly and peaceful, but also credible, it said at the start of the campaign the other week. “We pray and urge Comelec to be strict and scrupulous in following the safeguards provided by law.”
Lest the usual smart-alecks distort the general call, the bishops went into details: “The safeguards asked by the Automated Election Law call for: (1) voter-verified paper trail (VVPT); (2) use of ultraviolet (UV) lamps to verify official ballots;
(3) use of digital signatures (different from the machine signatures);
(4) proper and trustworthy source code review, unhampered by restrictive conditions;
(5) true random manual audit (RMA) immediately after the election;
( 6) inputs in the Comelec public website the election results by precinct.”
On the first point alone, the Comelec already balked. At a hearing last week of the Joint Congressional Oversight Committee, the poll bdy recited a litany of misgivings:
Supposedly the VVPT could be used to sell one’s vote. Purportedly voters might refuse to drop their VVPTs into the ballot box. Seemingly the printing out and personal reviewing of the VVPTs would prolong the voting pro- cess by two hours. Ostensibly a gofer of a losing candidate could claim his VVPT to be inaccurate just to discredit the balloting. Allegedly this; apparently that.
The Comelec grumblings brought to
mind the Tagalog saying, “Kapag ayon, may paraan, kapag ayaw may katuwiran (If willing, there’s a way; if not, there’s excuses).” At one point a Comelec exchairman snarled that critics allegedly think themselves better than the seven commissioners who had junked the VVPT. The geezer had to be reminded that the voter receipt is required by law. And if numbers be the gauge, then he must know that majority of the 24 senators and 270 congressmen had enacted that law.
As a paper audit trail, the VVPT would make the count honest and credible. It was inserted in the law to ensure that whatever automated technology the Comelec procures accurately would reflect the will of the electorate, With the VVPT, potential manipulators inside the Comelec and Smartmatic would think twice about fudging the poll results.
Vote selling is a malady among penurious voters, to be sure. Yet, it is a totally different problem from honest, credible vote counting. Vote selling is committed outside the polling precinct. It requires different law enforcement actions. The Comelec’s fears of refusal to surrender the VVPT, prolonged voting hours, or disruptive voters are extreme cases, if not shallow alibis. It would not be surprising if Smartmatic is dictating to the Comelec how to avoid implementing the VVPT.
There are solutions to such little concerns. Like, since maximum 800 voters per machine are neighbors who know each other, they easily can photograph and tag by smartphone a disruptive VVPT holder. Prolonged voting time can be fixed with orderly voter flow. There’s also this suggestion from reader
Edgardo J. Tirona: designate the poll watchdog Namfrel again to collect and secure the VVPTs, for use in precinct-level manual counts as checks against the unseen digital machine transmissions.
If Comelec and Smartmatic persist in ignoring the law, and well meaning suggestions of information-technologists and Catholic bishops, then there can only be one conclusion. They are afraid that the VVPT would expose once and for all the inaccuracy and unreliability of the machines. Therefore, the tens of billions of pesos used to lease-purchase, accessorize, warehouse, and transport the machines in the past three elections were all for nothing. High officials would be sent to prison, their kickbacks confiscated, and their names tarnished forever as greedy saboteurs of democratic elections.
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Is the poll body afraid that the voter-verified paper trail will expose the voting machines to be inaccurate and fraudulent?