A Pope of, from and by the people?; Why manual elections in May?

By now most Filipinos already know who was elected the new Pope: the former Cardinal Jorge Bergogliom of Argentina. According to the London Guardian’s “Pope Francis: 13 key facts about the new Pontiff” he lives in a small flat, takes the bus and only has one functioning lung. Before his election, the talk was the next Pope was certainly going to take the name Peter. That gives us a hint on what Cardinals debated and pondered n during the election.

On the other hand Catholics believe the first Pope was Peter that means rock.

“Thou art Peter and upon this rock, I will build my church,” were the words of his appointment by Jesus.

The Guardian article put together Pope Francis’ profile. It cited 13 facts we should know about him:

• He likes to travel by bus.

• He has lived for more than 50 years with one functioning lung. He had the other removed as a young man because of infection.

“• He is the son of an Italian railway worker.

• He trained as a chemist.

• He is the first non-European pope in the modern era.

• He claims that adoption by homosexuals is a form of discrimination against children but believes that condoms “can be permissible” to prevent infection.

• In 2001 he washed and kissed the feet of Aids patients in a hospice.

• He speaks fluent Italian, as well as Spanish and German.

• Until now he has been living in a small flat, eschewing a formal

bishop’s residence.

• He told Argentinians not to travel to Rome to celebrate if he was

appointed but to give their money to the poor instead.

• He is believed to have been the runner-up in the last papal conclave in 2005.

• He has co-written a book, in Spanish, called Sobre el Cielo y la Tierra (On Heaven and Earth). You can buy it on Kindle.

• Though conservative on church doctrine, he has criticized priests who refuse to baptize babies born to single mothers.”

We can guess at what kind of discussions might have taken place. With cardinals coming from all over the world and coming from varying countries and cultures, they had to agree on one defining idea in the choice of the Supreme Pontiff.

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This article “Electronic voting is failing the developing world while the US and Europe abandon it” comes from a blog called E-merging markets that is more concerned with the uses of computers in banking and business. So it comes as a surprise that it should take up electronic voting.

“Every vote counts..unless the SMS doesn’t go through,” says the author, Lily Kuo.

She cites the recent elections in Kenya. “It was supposed to be the most modern election in Africa. Kenyan authorities, hoping to avoid the chaos of the 2007 election, decided that this time the country would use a tamper-proof, state-of-the-art electronic voting system where voter IDs would be checked on hand-held devices and results transmitted to Nairobi through text messages.”

She adds that “But everything that could go wrong did. The biometric identification kits to scan people’s thumbs broke down; a server meant to take in results from 33,400 voting centers sent via SMS became overloaded; and some election operators forgot the passwords and PIN numbers for the software. Polling centers went back to hand counting ballots and results were delayed almost a week, until March 9 when victory was announced. And every day before that people feared a repeat of 2007 when results were delayed and violence erupted, killing 1,200 people.”

Although it is about Kenya, it could very well be the Philippines, indeed about most countries now choosing between electronic or manual elections. “The troubled electronic voting experiment is part of a strange dichotomy where electronic voting is on the way out in most Western countries, but taking hold in emerging economies, possibly to their detriment.

More Latin American countries were experimenting or using e-voting machines in 2012.

“In the US and Western Europe, more states have been opting out of electronic voting systems and returning to paper out of worries over the number of glitches and, as we’ve reported before, the inability to verify that electronic votes or the software on machines have not been manipulated.”

She adds that in the US 2012 election, 56% of voters cast paper ballots that were optically scanned while only 39% used electronic voting machines. Similarly in Europe only two countries‑Belgium and France‑use electronic ballots. Out of eight European countries that have experimented with electronic voting, six reverted back to paper ballots.

“In contrast, developing countries in Latin America and Asia are embracing e-voting. As in Kenya’s case, moving to electronic polls is seen as a way of boosting democratic credentials, possibly increasing voter engagement, and demonstrating technological progress. Following Brazil’s lead, Venezuela, Paraguay, Panama, Costa Rica and Mexico have all implemented some form of e-voting.India also uses electronic ballots across the country; and Pakistan is considering similar technology.”

“The greatest danger,” Democracy Reporting International notes, is that these governments see electronic voting as a silver bullet to fix all of their electoral problems. Governments then divert public funds to expensive electronic voting experiments, instead of on ways to eliminate ballot buying, voter intimidation, and post-election violence‑all of which can still happen in the context of e-voting.”

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When Smartmatic-PCOS was contracted for the May 2010 elections, other countries were already experiencing problems with automatic electoral systems but I have not heard that any Comelec official or indeed legislators in charge of election looked into the matter. Indeed, up to this minute, even critics of Smartmatic-PCOS still hope that everything will be all right once the glitches are corrected.

So it is good that AES Watch is beginning to say it the way it is.

“We must be ready for manual elections” it said in a letter to Comelec Chairman Sixto Brillantes.

Why can’t we draw lessons from what has already happened to other countries, some of them even more sophisticated in computer echnology?

Or are Comelec officials even interested in facing the issue of rejecting automatic electoral system in favor of manual elections?