Anxiety

For years, we have been clamoring for the automation of our electoral process. The old manual process was slow, tedious and vulnerable. It required great physical endurance on the part of public servants pressed into electoral service and the slow count put the country on edge when the expiry of terms of office neared and proclamations were delayed.

Now that we are finally putting an automated process in place, there is much anxiety expressed about it. Some of those who most loudly demanded automation find themselves in the unlikely position of opposing it, even asking the courts to step in and abort it.

To be sure, the system now being installed is complex and probably prone to hitches. It requires printing something like 30,000 different ballots tailored to contain the names of tens of thousands of candidates down to the contenders for the post of municipal councilors.

The expensive machines for automated ballot counting are vulnerable to sabotage. In the past, contestants for minor municipal elective posts have actually burned down schoolhouses to destroy votes cast in their rivals’ favor. What is to prevent the petty municipal rivals from debilitating machines in the next elections, in the process undermining the more important vote count for national elective offices which is the reason automation is being done in the first place.

Then there are those chronically paranoid about the capacity of cheaters to subvert any electoral system to overturn the popular will. They fear that the manual cheating of the past will simply be replaced with automated cheating in the future.

There is no relief for the chronically paranoid. Whatever process of counting we deploy, they will fear.

I have not followed the developments in the automation of our electoral process as closely as I probably should have. The reason for the relative disinterest is that I have proposed some more radical solutions to the problems of electoral efficiency and integrity in the past.

As a political scientist, I have maintained that what we needed to change was the system of representation itself. If we abolished elections at large and made all representation local, say, in a parliamentary framework, there might even be no need to invest so much in automation. That will also have the healthy consequence of strengthening our political party system and forcing us to give primacy to party programs over personalities.

Note that the entire automation process, the billions that will be spent for it and the tens of thousands of people who will be trained to handle the new technologies are all being done to elect only 14 people: the president, the vice-president and 12 senators. Some of those elected at large have proven to be a disgrace to the nation.

Well, add to the 14 individuals the party-list groups chosen to occupy second-class seats at the House of Representatives. I have expressed my own discomforts about the party-list system and there is not enough space here to repeat them. Suffice it to say that this innovation in representation is patently idiotic.

 Critics of my proposal argue that our people would not accept a system of representation where they do not directly elect the president and vice-president or vote their favorite action stars to the Senate. Besides, the electoral finance system we have evolved in the past few elections depended on candidates running for national elective posts raise the money for those running for locally-elected posts. That is the origin of so much money-politics, so much corruption and so much incentive for influence-peddling.

A bankrupt electoral culture is ever so hard to reform. Even those who supposedly represent marginalized social sectors via the party-list system will resist reform in this regard because they have a vested interest in averting their own political extinction.

Besides, abolishing elections at large requires fundamental Charter change covering the form of government and the system of representation. That has been nearly impossible to do. Those who benefit from the present imperfect setup will fight tooth-and-nail to prevent constitutional reform.

The other proposal I have nursed since I consulted for a former Comelec chairman many years ago was to shift to a digitalized electoral process. That will be less costly since the system will simply ride piggy-back on the existing networks, including the ATM system of the banking industry. It will be made even cheaper if a national broadband network is eventually installed.

But this system will require the establishment of a reliable, digital national ID system. For reasons I could not comprehend, there are those resisting the establishment of such an ID system which will bring our governance institutions to the digital age.

For better or for worse, we have an automation system now being installed. It still has paper ballot and nationally elected candidates. It is not a truly digital system where votes are counted the moment they are cast. It is really an add-on to the old manual process we have become habituated to.

Our elections will still be money-driven and our political parties will remain weak. We will probably cure some of the cheating but not the more fundamental ills of our personality-driven electoral culture.

For all its shortcomings, however, we have to make this system work. All of us will have to contribute our small share to make this system work — only because the consequence of this elections failing are simply unthinkable.

I doubt if anyone will really try and force this new electoral process to fail. To try and do so will require so much contempt for the good of the nation.