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The Philippines hails election automation a success
Critics said the Philippines’ first automated election was certain to fail. But on May 11th, the day after the country’s presidential, vice presidential and senatorial elections saw more than 53 million Filipinos vote using 76,347 Precinct Count Optical Scan machines, the process was declared the cleanest, fastest, and most orderly election yet.
The elections were not postponed, as was widely predicted after a fault was found in the voting machines’ memory chips and 76,000 chips had to be recalled less than a week before election day. The elections did not require a parellel manual vote, as was called for by some in the media, and even in government, who expected the machines to fail.
After the voting period, which had been extended by an hour to allow for the long queues at polling stations, closed at 7pm on May 10th, Commission on Elections (COMELEC) Chairman Jose Melo (pictured) told reporters: “I’m smiling again. Automation has been a success.”
A criticism of the technology used to count the votes was that it was too error prone. In an interview with FutureGov in September 2009, the political thinktank Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG) said that the failure of PCOS machines – reported to be between two and ten per cent - was too high for the election to succeed.
But although 465 PCOS machines reported to the poll body as malfunctional, 75,882 machines worked without a glitch – a failure rate of 0.5 per cent.
High temperatures in crowded polling stations (up to 36 degrees Celsius) prompted election officials to fan the ballot machines to prevent them from overheating.
Meanwhile, at polling stations to serve the large Filipino diaspora, heat and humidity in Singapore caused moisture to interfere with some machines when they were brought out to polling booths from their airconditioned storage rooms.
“This was a problem we could correct,” Neal Imperial, Minister and Consul General of the Embassy of the Philippines in Singapore, and Chairman of the Special Board of Canvassers for the Philippine elections in Singapore, told FutureGov. “We have nine machines, seven of which we are used, and they worked perfectly well. Those who voted said they are happy with the voter experience, which only took between five and ten minutes.”
Voter turnout in Singapore was lower than expected (25 per cent of the registered 31,851 voters), although Imperial pointed out that a large number of registered voters had left Singapore to return to the Philippines or to work elsewhere.
400,000 text messages had been sent to overseas Filipinos to encourage them to vote and inform them of voting procedure.
“Most voters have been very happy with the process, which they tell me feels more efficient and secure,” said Imperial. “Since there is no possibility of human error in the counting, that cuts out the opportunity for cheating. The Philippines is the first country in Southeast Asia to implement overseas absentee voting, and first to implement automated polls. We’re a pioneer in expanding democracy.”
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