Distracted

The carnival that is the impeachment process comes to town in a few days, as soon as Congress opens for business. Considering that the Chief Justice decided to hold his place and fight the impeachment, we are in for an intensely political episode with no one clearly in control of the outcomes.

In this intensely political episode, many wonder if the legislature can get any work done. So little work was accomplished by this Congress over the past 18 months when there was relative political peace with a freshly elected President holding hegemony over the terrain. Contested but vital pieces of legislation such as the RH bill and the Freedom of Information Act have gathered dust on the shelves of both chambers. How much better could it fare in an increasingly polarized political climate where it seems the Presidency, more than the Chief Justice, is more anxious about its political survival?

Foremost on the table is a decision about continuing automation of the 2013 polls.

This is a decision that needs to be made by the Commission on Elections Advisory Council (CAC) that includes senators and congressmen. The legislators sitting in that council need a working consensus from members of their respective chambers to arrive at a decision on how to go about with the business of automating our polls.

The decision involves whether we continue with the fully automated system used in the last elections or to step back and adopt the mongrel system of partial automation proposed by some groups. After that issue is settled, the CAC then decides on whether or not the Smartmatic PCOS system used the last time is the most adequate technology for our purposes. Should this be considered the best possible technology, the CAC must then decide on whether to purchase outright the system used for the 2010 polls or to continue leasing that system.

After all those decision points shall have been crossed, the CAC must then decide on the budget for automating the 2013 elections. The existing allocation may be sufficient or it may not. Any supplementary allocation will have to go through the congressional process.

For some, the next elections might seem a way off. Comelec chair Sixto Brilliantes, however, says that a decision on the matter must be completed before March this year. Any later than that, there will not be enough time to bid out the contracts, install the hardware required, train the personnel to run the system and print the election materials adapted to the chosen system.

As we know from our experience in the 2010 automated process, the logistical concerns are complex. It was nearly a miracle that we managed to bring that system into place in a short time (about two years). Nevertheless, numerous issues were raised against the process and those issues need to be properly addressed so that the people will be absolutely confident about the reliability of the technology used.

Today, we have less than a year-and-a-half before the next electoral exercise. Every day that passes without a final decision on the part of the CAC is a crucial day lost. Each day lost brings us closer to such a state of unpreparedness that the elections could end up in absolute chaos.

In a recent forum, Brilliantes admitted that there is hardly any time left to scout for new automated voting systems. There is hardly any money, either, to indulge in experimentation with new systems.

The Comelec requested P10.2 billion in the 2012 appropriations act to adequately prepare for the 2013 polls. Congress eventually allotted only P7 billion, or 68 percent of the original request. The smaller allotment basically rules out purchasing or even leasing a new system.

Unless Congress is willing to consider several more billions in special appropriations, the Comelec is basically directed towards acquiring the Smartmatic PCOS system at a third of its cost (we paid two-thirds of the cost of the system in lease when it was deployed in 2010). Smartmatic, presumably, will earn more if it sells the used system to another country at more than a third of its initial cost — except that we have, by contract, the right to purchase the system at a third of its original price.

The international observers who came to examine our automated polls in 2010 were pretty satisfied with the reliability of the system deployed. On the basis of independent opinion polls taken after the election, our voters appear quite satisfied with the system.

Sen. Ferdinand R. Marcos, chair of the Senate local governments committee, along with Reps. Rufus Rodriguez and Justin Mark Chipeco of the HRET have separately pointed out the greater economy of using the same PCOS system we used before. It will mean saving billions by purchasing the hardware outright and a lesser expense in training the tens of thousands of people who will man the automated polls.

The only thing, it appears, standing in the way of a timely policy decision on the matter is a group of lobbyists advocating an alternative system that is still largely manual and only partially automated. Not only do these lobbyists represent purveyors of the technology to be used in the mongrel system they advocate, their advocacy likewise runs counter to the fully automated voting process envisioned in RA 9369 (The Automated Elections Law).

The CAC, for the sake of an adequately laid out automated electoral system, should decide as early as possible on the policy questions put before it. They should do that before we are completely distracted by this almost comical impeachment process that is irreversibly in motion.