New poll voting machines to have audio feature

MANILA, Philippines – Voting will be much easier for the illiterate and people with disabilities (PWDs) as the Commission on Elections (Comelec) will activate the audio feature of the vote counting machines (VCMs) in the May 2016 elections.

Comelec Chairman Andres Bautista said through the audio feature, the illiterate and PWDs can hear the names of the candidates they voted for.

“In case they had someone shade their ballots for them, they will be able to know who their assistants really voted for. There will be headphones they can use. This is one of the features of our machines now,” he said.

The Comelec is leasing 97,517 VCMs from Smartmatic-Total Information Management Corp. to be used in the elections.

Bautista said the poll body will enable three out of four security features of the VCMs that are subjects of an online petition at change.org. These are the ultraviolet (UV) lamps, source code and digital signatures. 

The Comelec would have to consult various stakeholders concerning the voter verification paper audit trail (VVPAT) feature of the VCMs.

In the online petition, the Comelec was asked to restore these security features to ensure the credibility of the elections. 

In the 2010 elections, Comelec had disabled the UV lamps and removed the provision of the digital signatures in the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines. 

The Comelec instead used portable or hand-held UV lamps which were supposed to detect fake ballots.  

The members of the Boards of Election Inspectors (BEIs), on the other hand, were supposed to digitally sign the election returns and certificates of canvass but the feature was disabled by Comelec in 2010.

Bautista said the Comelec is also looking at requiring human signatures of the BEIs on the documents.

Regarding the VVPAT, Bautista said the machines are capable of producing a print out of the ballots filled up by voters but the Comelec is not inclined to activate this feature. 

“On the screen of the machines, you would see the names of your candidates. But the question is, should we enable that feature? We need to consult different stakeholders because there are pros and cons on that. The big pro is the transparency that we all like,” he added.

But there are concerns over time-and-motion because activating such feature could prolong the voting procedure.