The abc's of the AES

MANILA, Philippines - Newspaper reports and television broadcasts have been warning about the perils of the Automated Election System (AES), citing the delayed schedules, machine glitches and other problems as indicative of the looming failure of our first ever nationwide Automated Election System.

Even presidential candidates have expressed doubts and fears about the new system. There are theories galore: of failed elections, of no elections, of stakeholders who will sabotage the elections. 

It is confusing and frightening, worrisome to say the least, enough to make one give up on the automated elections even before it is able to start running. But that would be truly a sad indictment of our times – that an initiative with potentially good results is prejudged as a failure without even being given the chance to prove itself.

I have sat in on several Commission on Elections (Comelec) Steering Committee meetings, which I have the privilege of joining as Communications and Media Director of the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV), the accredited citizens’ arm of the Comelec and a veteran in voters’ education and pollwatching for close to two decades, having participated in some 22 electoral exercises. I listened to the commissioners, the Comelec Advisory Council and the various stakeholders struggling with the herculean task of putting together our first automated election. Unlike many, I have faith in the possibilities of the AES. 

We are happy to join STARweek in trying to demystify the Automated Election System. Let’s examine the AES and get to know it. We do not intend to advocate any particular method, process or organization, but merely to present facts and information that will hopefully help you the citizen understand the AES and, as a voter, use it as a means to attain peaceful and credible elections.

Is the May 2010 election 100 percent automated?

Republic Act 9369 (An Act Amending the Election Modernization Act, January 23, 2007) mandates the Comelec to use an automated election system, and in pursuit of this mandate, the Comelec, through Resolution No. 8739 dated Dec. 29, 2009, resolved “to adopt a paper-based automated election by using Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines.” 

Herein lies the definition of automation. It is paper-based, which means that a vote will still have to be made by marking a ballot and is, as such, manual as far as the voting procedure is concerned. 

This differs from the fully automated system called the Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) system, where a voter interacts with a computer by simply pushing buttons corresponding to the names of the candidates he wishes to vote for. 

Unlike the DRE method, the paper-based voting method leaves a paper trail. The ballots, when completed, will be fed into a PCOS machine which will do three things:

(1) The PCOS machine will make a digital scan – a photograph in layman’s terms – of both the front and back faces of the ballot. 

(2) After scanning, the machine will spit out the filled up ballot into the ballot box underneath the machine. (3) At the end of the voting period or when the polls close, the machine will count and consolidate all the votes it had scanned. 

In summary, there will be a physical paper record via the ballots. An additional record which strengthens the audit trail is the digital one, an exact copy of the ballot which was digitally scanned and which resides in the two memory cards in the PCOS machine.

So where does the automation begin? Automation applies to the counting and consolidation of votes and their transmission from polling precinct to canvassing center. 

Other processes, such as the registration and identification of voters and the act of filling up a ballot, generally remain the same as in the manual voting process.

Automated election trivia

Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Curacao, among other countries, have utilized the same paper-based automated process using PCOS machines. Brazil is closely monitoring our elections as they too are reviewing a shift to the paper-based PCOS mode of conducting elections.

It is comforting to know that we are not pioneering this method and that it has been successfully implemented in other countries. 

Closer to home, automated elections have been conducted in the 2008 regional elections in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). Both the DRE and the paper-based OMR (Optical Mark Readers, which is a variation of the PCOS) methods were used, with learnings from this exercise used as one of the bases for selecting the paper-based automated election system using PCOS machines for May 2010.

The author is Communications and Media Director of the PPCRV.

Editor’s note: Beginning this week and every Sunday thereafter until the Sunday before election day, we will run articles on the different aspects of the Automated Election System to be used in the May 10 polls, including the system itself and the machine, how to vote, what to do and what not to do, the citizen’s role, and others. This series is an initiative of STARweek in cooperation with non-partisan groups such as the PPCRV, and does not involve any politician or political party. Readers may send in questions and comments by email to [email protected].