Philippines 2010 Elections, Electronic Voting or Computer Voting

Philippines 2010 Elections, Electronic Voting or Computer Voting 

 

 The Presidential elections, legislative elections and local elections in the Philippines are scheduled to be held on May 10, 2010. Yes, it would be the second time that I'll be voting, yehey. The elected president will become the 15th President of the Philippines, succeeding President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who is barred from seeking re-election due to term restrictions. If current Vice-President Noli de Castro should not retake office, his successor will be the 15th Vice President of the Philippines. The legislators elected in the 2010 elections will join the senators of the 2007 elections and will comprise the 15th Congress of the Philippines.
The 2010 election will be administered by the Commission on Elections in compliance with the Republic Act No.9369,[1] also known as Amended Computerization Act of 2007. It will be the first national computerized election in the history of the Philippines. Local elections are also to be held in all provinces, cities and municipalities.
But wait did I mentioned that it would be the first national computerized election in the Philippines? Yes it is! I checked the comelec website and it says that the upcoming elections will be computerized because of the said Amended Computerization
Act of 2007. I'm actually excited of the new process but like many of us registered voters we don't exactly know what's going to happen. I remember the first time I voted in 2004 where I was given a voting ballot to write down my chosen candidates and now it's already computerized! That's what I call sign of the times in this computer age. Am I right?

Also now I'm a bit confused by the term computer voting and electronic voting. In the States and in other countries we always hear electronic voting and personally I'm amazed by the system. So I did some research to see what is electronic voting in lay man's term. According to what I read electronic voting system like the one in the US will allow voters and elections auditors to go online and verify whether votes have been correctly recorded. It uses cryptographic techniques to let both voters and election auditors check whether votes have been cast and counted accurately. That sounds good. To cast a vote, an individual takes a paper ballot and fills in the optical-scan oval next to the name of the selected candidate using a pen with a special type of ink. When the bubble is filled, it reveals a three-digit confirmation number already printed on the ballot using an invisible marker. This is a super technology I must say. That three-digit code is a sort of randomly generated cryptographic marker that's used to associate the voter's choice with the appropriate candidate. The codes are separately randomized for each oval and for each ballot, ensuring that the codes don't reveal who an individual voted for. Voters can use that confirmation code to later log into the city's election Web site to confirm that their votes were recorded accurately. If the code is present on the Web site, it means the ballot was counted correctly. Wow isn't that cool? Okay now back to the Philippines. For us Pinoys, the Comelec has contracted with the Dutch company Smartmatic and its local partner Total Information Management, Inc. (TIM) on July 10, for the supply of Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines. The PCOS are a form of Optical Mark Reader (OMR) machines that function by reading and counting the markings made by voters on the ballots after the same are fed to the machines. Ahhhh. Under an automated system voters will no longer have to write the names of candidates. The voting is done by either darkening the ovals, completing broken arrows, or making any authorized mark opposite the names of candidates for a particular position. At the end of voting in every precinct, the results are electronically transmitted to a central counting center (which could be a city/municipality or province) for consolidation and proclamation of the winners. Results are expected to come out in less than a week.This clearly shortens the multi-layered process in a manual election system like poll watching here and there I think and of course the possible fraud or 'pandaraya'. Oh I guess computer voting won't give us that code to be able
to check our votes online. Oh well. I think this is a good development in our voting system, hope it works! I'm quite excited to vote already. ---anne



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