Reality check

Before automation of the 2010 elections became a sure thing, expats from industrialized countries where elections are still conducted manually often asked me why Filipinos were so eager to shift to automated voting.

Manual elections worked fine for them, the expats pointed out. Votes were tallied per polling center; the tallies were put together and the winners proclaimed. The results for both local and national contests could be known within as early as 24 hours; a week would be a long time.

The system is simple, quick and reliable. And cheaper than automated elections. Plus they’ve never had to worry about hanging chads – those little bits of paper that Americans punch out of holes as they pick their choices in their voting cards – that could wreak havoc in a presidential election. Machines, the expats liked to point out, could be just as fallible as humans.

My answer to the expats was always the same. Through automation, we hoped to achieve what manual elections couldn’t in a society where various forms of poll fraud have been perfected: quick results.

At the very least, I told them, the brief wait for the outcome especially of national races would reduce the window of opportunity for manipulating the results.

Today there’s a continually growing line of losers claiming to be victims of electronic cheating. But with little to show as solid proof, and with dubious witnesses in koala masks merely sowing confusion, it does look like Chairman Jose Melo of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) was correct in saying that automation proved too fast for “Garci.”

Lintang Bedol at least seems to have been befuddled by the new system. We don’t hear any complaints about the results of the Senate race, with the winners proclaimed by the Comelec in record time.

The winners for president and vice president should have been proclaimed at the same time as the senators, since the results are based on the same certificates of canvass (COC). But the task belongs to the 14^th Congress.

So these days we are instead feeling a disappointing sense of déjà vu. We are told that the new president and vice president can be proclaimed only on June 15, over a month after election day – and we are supposed to count ourselves lucky because it won’t be on June 30.

We now remember that even in manual elections, what took so long was not the tallying at the precinct level. What has always moved at glacial pace was the canvassing by Congress.

Even if we spent the entire annual national appropriation on poll modernization, Philippine lawmakers are too set in their ways to enter the modern age. Their advice to the impatient as Congress plods on is this: when a slow canvass is inevitable, just grin and bear it.

* * *

When the canvass finally got underway last week, it was painful to watch congressional pages using pliers to open the ballot boxes from the overseas vote.

Everything seemed to proceed in slow motion: the examination of each COC, the announcement of the figures, followed by close-ups of the enduring symbol of the Philippine vote – a large sheet of paper where the numbers were displayed, written in longhand in thick, black ink.

There was a slight modification: this time the figures were meticulously written down on pieces of paper that were then stuck, post-it style (maybe they were post-its) to the spaces after the names of the candidates.

When all the blanks in a sheet of paper were covered with post-its, the sheet was taken down, and, lo and behold, there was another sheet behind it. The wonders of the modern age!

At the end of the first hours on the first day of canvassing, the COCs had yielded a few thousand votes, and our exhausted, overworked and underpaid lawmakers called it a day. Thirty-seven million more votes to go!

And taxpayers paid P7.8 billion for this? I want my money back.

* * *

I wouldn’t call manual elections antiquated. As those expats have pointed out, they get election results quickly, efficiently, peacefully and accurately using the manual system.

But these are mostly societies where violence, murder, vote buying and tampering with results are not seen as valid instruments of election victory. These are societies where serious efforts are made to regulate campaign finance. These are societies where poll fraud is not rewarded by resolving poll disputes a few weeks or even days before the cheater has fully served the term of a stolen office.

What the congressional canvass serves to emphasize is that it will take more than automation to eliminate the long, slow count and the many other ills that afflict Philippine elections.

Melo showed the wonders of automation by announcing the likely winner in the presidential race just hours after the end of voting. Before automation, we would have relied on exit polls, which in this case reflected the same results announced by the Comelec. But the pollsters were always accused of trending, which heightened tension before the proclamation of winners.

In the first few days after the elections, the nation was euphoric over automation. The congressional canvass is our reality check. Election results within 24 hours, or even 72? The message from Congress is, dream on.

There is no modern, multibillion-peso fix to this election glitch.