Culture of fraud

Britain has one of the most efficient voting systems in the world. After a few hours, the winning governing party is known. The prime minister, if he has lost his mandate, leaves office and his official residence as soon as the final results are out.

The system isn’t perfect. In recent years there were scandals over rigging postal votes – filled ballots sent by mail. But overall the British have managed to preserve the integrity of their vote. I can’t remember them needing to go to their highest court to resolve questions about vote results, as the Americans did in the Florida vote during the presidential race between George W. Bush and Al Gore.

What sort of voting machine and software do the Brits use? No computers, just pen and paper.

The head of the Asia Pacific Directorate of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Scott Wightman, reminded me during his visit to Manila last week that Britain uses the manual voting system.

UK Ambassador Peter Beckingham confirmed this yesterday. “Voters place an X against the name of the preferred candidate and place the ballot in the box. The votes are then counted manually and results start appearing after about three hours,” he informed me.

Ballot boxes are opened and the votes counted in the presence of representatives of the contending parties, Wightman said.

I asked him if their ballot boxes have to be placed under heavy guard against tampering or theft. No, he said.

Has anyone been killed in election-related violence? No, he replied, smiling in amusement until I told him that an average of 60 people die in the Philippines in poll-related violence in every electoral exercise.

Do the Brits count votes quickly because they have fewer people? The UK population stood at nearly 61 million as of July last year. Population estimates for the Philippines, where there are still unregistered births, range from 90 million to 96 million.

But even when the Philippine population was lower than 61 million, we could not count our votes properly.

Will automation make a difference?

The voting process related by Wightman and Beckingham is similar to ours. The system works for Britain. Why can’t it work for us?

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Wightman asked me what they could expect from the Philippines next year. I told him we were hoping to have general elections, and hoping the results would lead to meaningful change.

Hope springs eternal for the typical Pinoy, and so much hope always lies in elections, marred as they have always been by the so-called Three G’s: guns, goons and gold.

I don’t think too many Filipinos care whether the elections will remain manual or become fully automated or only partially computerized. People still expect poll fraud. Crooks will find a way to cheat, although they may have a harder time rigging the vote under a new system that they have not yet mastered.

There are people who fear that poll automation, if done haphazardly and in a rushed manner – as it is being done now – will only make vote tampering easier.

What people care about is that the elections might be postponed and incumbent officials led by President Arroyo, already the longest serving Chief Executive since dictator Ferdinand Marcos, will hang on to power.

Hope also springs eternal for the President’s allies at the House of Representatives, who have not yet dropped their initiative to fast-track Charter change and shift to a new system of government that will allow all of them together with the President to keep their posts beyond noon of June 30, 2010.

These politicians will be up against all the individuals who want to replace them, all the businessmen who are already preparing campaign materials for potential candidates, and all the people who have come to expect a redistribution of wealth in every electoral exercise in this country. Campaign spending will help the country avoid a recession, and the administration wants to stop the elections?

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Poll automation is no foolproof guarantee against fraud. We’ve seen a schoolhouse burned down, destroying election materials and killing a teacher and poll watcher in the process, by men (including cops) believed to be working for a losing candidate in Taysan, Batangas. We’ve had an election supervisor, Lintang Bedol, lose election paraphernalia in Maguindanao.

If the 2010 elections are automated, we might see more schoolhouses used as polling precincts put to the torch, or automated voting machines destroyed. Automation will also not stop politicians from simply eliminating their rivals through assassination or intimidation, as many have done for as long as we can remember.

As the Florida vote showed, voting machines can also have glitches.

What automation can do is speed up the vote count and reduce tension and violence in the long wait for the results. The speed can also reduce opportunities for vote manipulation.

Also, we passed the law on poll modernization over a decade ago and amended it a few years later. Why does Congress keep wasting time, effort and public funds to pass laws that are never implemented?

We want poll automation because we are tired of waiting for a month for the results of general elections.

But automation is just one step in promoting the efficiency, accuracy and integrity of elections. As the Brits have shown, there is no need for automation if manual voting works.

What we need is a change in our election culture: candidates who do not resort to the so-called Three Gs, people who don’t sell their votes and are not intimidated, cops and soldiers who enforce gun laws and do not allow themselves to be used for partisan purposes, election personnel who refuse to be used and know how to count quickly and accurately.

Without these changes, our elections, regardless of the type of voting system, will always be marred by fraud.