Elections is about the quality of the count and the quality of the vote.
ON THE QUALITY OF THE COUNT
The Commission on Elections (Comelec) under its Chairman Andres B. Bautista has very little time to choose the system and the machines to be used, partly because there was undue delay in replacing retiring commissioners, when everybody knew when the vacancies would occur.
Secondly, all the commissioners are lawyers, which is not the design of the Constitution because elections is not just a legal problem. It is an administrative, behavioral, systems and, above all, a management problem. Hence, under the Constitution, 3 of the 7 commissioners need not be lawyers. Every president has instead given preference to political patronage in this regard. More important, the Comelec under Mr. Bautista is faced with a task that is framed by decisions that are imprudent at best and corruption-tainted at worst.
(a) First is the purchase by the Comelec -- then under its Chair Sixto S. Brillantes Jr. -- of the Smartmatic machines against the advice of its own Advisory Council, its citizens arms, the Philippine Computer Society and IT professionals. This is a system that did not comply with all the safeguards required by law. That decision is costing the country a lot of money, some of which will likely end up in the wrong pockets.
(b) I am sure Mr. Bautista is aware about the issues that have to be resolved -- the universal advice of international experts that a “vendor-driven system is a big no-no in the choice of a system, which was the case in 2010 and 2013 when Smartmatic practically controlled the process; the compact flash (CF) card mistake in 2010; the lack of (1) ultraviolet safeguard, (2) time stamps, (3) a voter-verified paper trail, (4) signature authentication, (5) validation of an accuracy of 99.995% and the poor performance by the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting on the random manual audit; the incomplete logs and data stored in the Precinct Count Optical Scan machines’ CF cards and in the Central Server; the underperformance of electronic transmission (9% in 2010, 23% in 2013); the matter of the source code review, etc.
(c) As of 2013, 18 of the 30 countries which had adopted automated counting through direct-recording electronic (DRE) machine had reverted to manual counting.
The reason?
The German Constitutional Court puts it this way -- the use of a computer count and determination of the results that cannot be examined by an ordinary citizen reliably and without specialist knowledge violates the principle of the public nature of elections, i.e. lack of transparency in a private count by a machine.
The dilemma of the Comelec is that the voters, the Comelec field people, the teachers and the politicians like the automated count because the “shading” procedure is easy, less burdensome to teachers, speedy results/early posting although (some of this is smoke and mirrors in terms of final results). Moreover, Smartmatic does not exactly enjoy the trust of many people, especially the IT professionals, but will still likely be the default machine and system supplier.
(d) I am glad to hear that the Comelec under Mr. Bautista plans to revisit the systems issue for the 2019 elections. In that regard, I suggest that three issues to be addressed: first, the definition of “appropriate technology” suitable to our needs and circumstances.
What it is not is that it must be either optical mark recognition or DRE and that hybrid systems do not qualify, which is legalism that if necessary, should be amended.
Second, the issue of a private vote and a public count as a basic principle of elections.
Third, the need for adjustments in legal procedures to make them more applicable to automated elections. The existing protest framework is basically analog and paper-based, when the evidence and processes are already digital. The Supreme Court is aware of this, not just in elections and is already beginning to do something about it.
ON THE QUALITY OF THE VOTE
The question is: What’s the point of an expensive, accurate and speedy count when what is being counted are votes that have already been devalued by (1) the improper, even illegal, use of money, mostly government funds, which practice is rooted in a serious poverty problem that politicians exploit; (2) dysfunctional political parties that limit our choice of candidates, (3) warlordism and entrenched political dynasties?
Reforms on these problems are dead in the water because Comelec has been pre-occupied with the issue of automation and the congressional oversight committee is not doing its job. Moreover, there is a fourth factor that is increasingly becoming a problem -- a media that is losing its independence because of money.
THE QUESTION BEGS TO BE ASKED: IF THE STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS ARE NOT ADDRESSED, IS AN EXPENSIVE AUTOMATION SYSTEM WORTH IT? PUT ANOTHER WAY, IF THE STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS ARE ADDRESSED, DO WE NEED TO AUTOMATE? (Parenthetically, this is the advantage of the developed countries which can choose to revert to manual systems, an advantage we do not have.)
Elections is the only right in a democracy where everybody is supposed to be equal with the one-man, one-vote rule. That is changing to a one-peso, one vote rule. As money increasingly rules, we do not have a democracy but a fiction of it. And this must change.
However, let me say that despite the limited choices the Comelec faces -- plus the delayed appointments, the failure to seriously study alternatives, the likelihood of another Smartmatic-driven elections, I believe that, barring a big blunder at the Comelec head office that results in selective hackings of the system at the local level or a massive failure of logistics, the 2016 elections will be considered by the people as generally credible, in its limited definition, if only for one reason -- the capability and the hardiness of the Comelec people at the ground level -- at the city and municipal levels -- to handle difficult situations.
I am a believer in the bureaucracy. I know that is counter-intuitive to many of you.
But the biggest lesson new commissioners learn is this -- there are many good people in the front lines who know what to do when given the chance to do it. They know how to improvise when systems fail or the unexpected happens. This is, of course, a double-edged sword that can be used for the right or the wrong purposes.
Moreover, a bureaucracy also tends to second guess their leaders because they have been burned many times by false reformers or by people, including commissioners, who want to use the Comelec as a stepping stone to higher office such as the Supreme Court.
Hence, the need to earn their trust and, in turn, to trust and support them in difficult times.
Mr. Bautista is on the right track on this and if he stays the course, my experience and instinct tell me that an inspired field organization of the Comelec can rise to the challenge.
Before I close, allow me to say that recently, the President gave an impressive list of his accomplishments.
I don’t disagree that he deserves congratulations for what he has done. But he was silent on what is most important to the poor -- social reform.
Certainly education and health are basic income reform programs but they are longer-term solutions. There is also asset reform to address immediate problems of mass poverty and inequality which are covered by four laws that all the administrations since EDSA have poorly implemented, not just the most recent Arroyo administration which unfortunately was in many instances the limited comparative horizon of the President -- agrarian reform, urban land reform, and housing, ancestral domain and fisheries reform -- which address the plight of the poorest of the poor in our country and whose lives have largely remained unchanged since EDSA, despite the fact that the central theme of the new Constitution is social justice.
This is bad news for the poor. It is not a problem for those of us in this room.
Because all of us somehow know directly or know somebody who is connected to the elected and those appointed by the elected in government.
We are all part of the ruling elite of 1% of the families -- about 18,500,000 in all -- that have stayed in power through changes in administration.
For want of a better term, our society can be described as “feudalistic” and we are the basket case in our part of the world in rate of growth the past 50 years, real per capita income and inequality.
And unless radical changes take place, we face an uncertain if not turbulent future because the poor can only wait so long. The President was right, his administration is only the beginning. That is why the next election and the next ones after that, in other words elections through the next generation, are critical. We need a new generation of leaders who know how it is to be poor.
That is why the next election must be about a leadership that will not only not compromise with corruption but must also be totally committed to social reform with the poor as the center of development, which every administration has not been, including the Aquino administration.
As Jeffrey Sachs noted in describing Asia, the most important factor for development is policies and in the Philippines, the shortcomings in that regard outweigh all the other factors combined. But all this is for another forum which I hope the Management Association of the Philippines (M.A.P.) will organize in the near future.
I have one parting advice to the Comelec: to paraphrase Albert Camus when he received the Nobel Peace Prize -- let us put ourselves at the service not of those who make history but of those who suffer it.
(The article reflects the personal opinion of the author and does not reflect the official stand of the Management Association of the Philippines or the M.A.P. This was lifted from the speech delivered by the author in a recent M.A.P. General Membership Meeting.)
Christian S. Monsod is the former Chair of Comelec and the Founding Chair of Legal Network for Truthful Elections or LENTE.
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source: Businessworld
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