Computers for poll automation now gathering dust

While a million officials across the Philippines labor through a month-long vote count after Monday’s elections, brand new computers bought for the polls are gathering dust in a Manila warehouse.

It did not have to be this way. In India, with an electorate nearly 10 times that of the Philippines, computerized voting ensured the results would be out three days after the last precincts closed on Monday.

The Filipino way harks back to the dark ages, where each vote is counted by hand and the results tabulated on paper. It is a long, laborious process, and it will take at least 25 days.

Exit polls showed more than 35 million of the 43.5 million registered voters cast their votes for the presidential, vice-presidential, congressional and local elections.

Analysts say public resistance to moves to modernize the ossified system was ultimately to blame for the chaos that accompanied the voting.

Thousands of people found themselves left off electoral roles and in some areas elections had to be held the following day because the ballot papers had not arrived.

Jose Concepcion, head of the independent poll watchdog National Citizens Movement for Free Elections, said the voters’ list problem began three years ago, when Congress voted to modernize the polling system.

"They messed up the list but that problem was not so big then," he said.

In February, the Supreme Court outlawed a P1.2-billion government contract to automate the vote count that would have ensured the winners were known within 30 hours.

The Commission on Elections had already procured about 2,000 of the counting machines from a South Korean supplier by the time the ruling came down.

They are stored at a rented central Manila warehouse setting taxpayers back some P300,000 a month, said Danilo Galvez of the Comelec administrative services division.

Huge lawsuits are expected because the court ordered the government to get the people’s money back.

The system was not introduced this year simply because "Comelec was not ready," said University of the Philippines political scientist Herman Kraft.

The court found that "the winning bid was made by a group that did not exist prior to the bidding itself," he told AFP. "Our law states that contracts must be awarded to companies that have a track record."

Kraft also said "there were bugs in the system which could not be ironed out in time for the election. The fact that it was not used was down to lack of preparation more than anything else."

The Comelec award process "is open to a lot of speculation," he added.

The public had always been ambivalent. Thirty percent of those polled by Manila-based group Social Weather Stations in September said the new system would make it "easier to cheat."

While it works rather well in mature democracies with smaller populations, such as France, manual vote counts in this fractious archipelago of more than 7,000 islands and 84 million people have always been a logistical nightmare.

Poor infrastructure makes for a deadly mix when election officials have to count votes in precincts threatened by deadly local political rivalries and communist and Muslim separatist insurgencies.

"The mere fact that we were able to hold this election at all despite all the shortcomings of the Comelec was to me nothing short of a miracle," said University of the Philippines sociologist Randolph David.

A suspicious electorate has frustrated previous government efforts to amend the constitution in favor of a parliamentary system, but Arroyo has pledged to convince her people to abandon the cumbersome and gridlock-prone presidential system.

Presidential campaign strategist Alex Magno said congressional and local elections once every three years would leave the economy broke.

"That electoral schedule seems to leave very little room for governing, much less for building grand plans for a nation that so direly needs these plans," Magno said. — AFP