Design flaw

The appropriation for poll automation has cleared both chambers of Congress despite some last-minute attempts at filibustering by Senator Francis Escudero. The way is clear towards finally ringing our electoral processes into the 21st century.

This decision to push ahead with poll computerization is not cheap. About P11.3 billion has been allocated for the purpose.

That is made more expensive by the fact that, over the last few elections, we have spent billions of pesos on various poll mechanization technologies that were obsolete the day we bought them. At one instance, we purchased a lot of Polaroid equipment that even then properly belonged to a museum. Then we bought mechanical counters that bogged down in soggy weather. Then there was that scandalous Mega Pacific deal that the Supreme Court voided in the public interest.

In the mid-nineties, I consulted with then Comelec chair Bernardo Pardo. At that time, I recommended full computerization of the electoral process modeled after what Brazil was doing even then. That would integrate both voter identification and the tallying process.

The first hurdle to achieve that was the development of a reliable citizen database, something eventually called a “national ID system.” That database will be usable not only for elections purposes. It will enable the consolidation of all independent identification systems, from the GSIS card to the drivers’ license numbers to the tax identification numbers. It will enhance citizen access to government services and provide the platform for the electronic passport system that will soon be in use all over the world.

There was much political resistance to the development of an integrated citizen database. The leftwing groups and other Neanderthals held on to that antiquated notion that a citizen database will infringe on the rights to privacy and will be used primarily for purposes of repression. The Ramos administration was taken to court — and lost — when it decided to begin such a database.

To date, we still do not have an integrated citizen database. The present administration has ordered the integration of all government-issued ID systems. But that is still a far cry from the sort of credible database that will enable us to join the rest of the world in shifting from paper to smart-card passports.

As far as I could understand from the reports, the present computerization program is really limited to the tallying process. It will enable us to aggregate the numbers very quickly and get results much earlier than the old, highly manual process could.

The old manual process involved making our teachers and other electoral volunteers work beyond the point of exhaustion. It exposed them to partisan violence. It produced smudgy paper-based reports filled with erasures and whose duplicates were barely readable.

In the last few presidential elections, the old process took so long that the counting — with all the protests and dilatory tactics — brought us perilously close to the constitutionally scheduled transfer of power. The antiquated process was prone to so much political uncertainty and could be the fuse that fires up a political conflagration.

I have not been paying as much attention as perhaps I should be on the present debate over the appropriate technologies required to raise the integrity of our electoral process. The reason for that relative disinterest is the conviction I have built up over the years that technology solves very little about what is wrong with our elections.

It will be a tough challenge to fully fix the technical side of our electoral process given all the design flaws in our system of representation. These design flaws orient our system towards money politics and celebrity-driven electoral campaigns. At all levels, the margin between winner and loser can boil down to very few votes — encouraging candidates to turn to syndicates capable of manipulating the count.

Among the design flaws in our system of electoral representation are: the separate election of president and vice-president; the absence of a provision for a run-off election in a multi-party setting; the elections-at-large of the senators and the first-past-the-post mode of congressional district representation.

The separate election of president and vice-president, we have seen, makes for much instability in the national leadership structure. Without the provision for a run-off election, our multi-party system condemns us to minority presidencies which are vulnerable to the machinations of our fractious elite.

Our Senate was originally conceived as a chamber for the proportional representation of the nation’s regions. It was later converted into a chamber elected nationwide. That raised the costs of seeking a seat in that chamber, indenturing all those who run for a seat to a variety of vested interests.

Otherwise, the demands of a nationwide campaign gives an edge to celebrities from the worlds of sports, movies and the mass media who enjoy a high degree of name-recall. It is forbidding for anyone else — who is neither a well-financed broker of special interests nor a media celebrity — to try and seek a seat in this chamber.

The first-past-the-post nature of representation in tiny congressional districts allows these seat to be permanently controlled by dominant political families in the provinces, shutting out other social sectors from effective representation. The party-list representation, intended to mask elite control, merely aggravates the democratic representation problem by enabling special interest groups with captive votes to control representation in this manner.

In sum, the system of representation we call electoral democracy is skewed to favor oligarchic interests. Even if we eventually clean up the system of counting votes through the use of modern technologies, the candidates are nevertheless pre-selected by oligarchic electoral financiers.

These design flaws moderate our expectations for truly representative democracy even as we invest billions in counting technologies.

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