by Jovie Cabais | Apr 11, 2010 | Tech Updates
In a matter of 29 days from today, the Philippines will finally implement an automated counting system for the national and local elections. May 10, 2010 will be a day when our country will finally show the world that we are done with the error-prone and easy to manipulate manual counting of ballots. Automated counting removes several opportunities to manipulate the election results at the precinct level but it also makes some worry that cheating can be automated, and that a scenario causing a failure of elections like continuous power outage would occur forcing us to go into a constitutional dilemma of having no replacement to officials who will end their terms this year. While it is easy to imagine scenarios of doom, these are really not that easy to do. In order for the automated counting to fail, any, or the combination of the following scenarios would have to be created: Total Power Failure throughout the country. Total power outage that lasts several days or weeks, causing total failure of all communication systems and draining all the battery power that comes with the counting machines. This power outage will have to start well before election day in order to ensure a failure of elections as well as a failure of everything else that requires electricity. Diesel and gasoline supply cut-off several days before the power outage starts to ensure all backup power systems will run out of fuel. If this total power failure happens, the elections probably won’t matter. All telecoms systems are jammed. Someone shells out a significant amount money to buy enough jamming machines to jam...
