by Jovie Cabais | May 2, 2010 | Tech Updates
The May 10, 2010 elections is perhaps information technology’s biggest moment in Philippine politics. The automation of the counting of ballots is intended to speed up the counting at the precinct level. It should be made clear though that the automation is only up to the counting at precinct level. Everything else is the same process of manual consolidation of ballot counts per precinct to municipal, provincial and then national levels. Some sectors have suggested that a parallel manual count must be done but this is unnecessary and very costly, not only to the government but to the political parties who have to monitor the manual count per precinct. The random manual count to audit the results of a randomly selected precinct is sufficient for the purpose of verifying the level of error occuring which we hope should be close to zero. Also, let’s not forget that manual counting is most likely going to be more error prone due to the biases of the persons doing the counting. The candidates can be confident they are elected, even with some level of counting error, by making sure they have a significant lead. A lead of 10% should be quite secure even with a 2% counting error. A lead of just 1% is just subject to naturally occuring error. It is the responsibility of the candidate to make sure he leads by enough votes and that he makes sure the votes he gets are protected from fraud after the automated counting. Can the computer that counts the votes on the PCOS machine be programmed to favor a certain candidate? Unfortunately the answer to this is yes. However, that is the reason for having a random manual count to audit the results. Organizations watching the elections should make sure the random selection of precincts where manual counting will be done is truly random and that random selection is done only after the official results are printed on all PCOS machines in the area. A candidate with enough influence and financing can implement a dagdag-bawas scheme if the manual count audit is not random. Also, the results of the precincts with manual counts should be compared to other precincts nearby to make sure the results are similar. If the random manual count for audit is done properly, it would be impossible not to detect an intentional rigging of the program doing the counting on the PCOS machine. As Ronald Reagan used to say, “Trust, but verify”. We should trust COMELEC and the technology they have implemented to speed up our election process. However, let us verify the results and not be complacent. And lastly, let us hope candidates not elected will concede gracefully and not blame technology for their situation after the elections. Share...
