The Precinct Count Optical Scanning System in action.
The Precinct Count Optical Scanning System in action.
“Within two hours (after the canvassing of votes), we can proclaim the municipal and city winning candidates.”
This is one of the many exciting innovations in the 2010 automated elections promised by Commissioner Rene V. Sarmiento of the Commission on Elections in the forum “Election 2010: Handa na ba sa Automation?”
Comelec can now implement full automation in the coming May 10 elections with President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s approval of RA 9369 or “An Act Authorizing the Commission on Elections To Use An Automated Election System in the May 11, 1998 National or Local Election and In Subsequent National And Local Election Exercises”on 23 Jan. 2007.
The law defines “automated election system” (AES) as one “using appropriate technology which has been demonstrated in the voting, counting, consolidating, canvassing and transmission of election result and other electoral process.
To Sarmiento, poll automation is “a dream that has become a reality: an electoral breakthrough and an electoral revolution” given that in the last 100 years, elections were manual.
“The first election was under the American colonial regime in July 1907. Eighty seats were available for the First Philippine Assembly. The last election was in October 2007, the synchronized barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan elections,” he said.
There are four major processes in the much-touted AES: biometric registration; voting, canvassing and generation of election returns and transmission of results.
“Your face, fingerprints and signature will be captured so that we can weed out and disqualify the flying voters,” Sarmiento said of the biometric capture in registration.
Voter registration ended on 31 Oct.
The second is voting itself, where most of the innovations brought by the AES will come in. One is the use of a special paper ballot which will have security marks and bar codes in ultraviolet ink. And rather than writing down the names, the voter simply shades the circle or oval next to his or her candidates of choice. Voters will also be provided special pens for the purpose.
At the heart of the AES is the Precinct Count Optical Scanning System (PCOS), a machine that uses an optical system to scan the ballots, count the votes, generate and transmit the election results.
Each PCOS is specifically configured for the precinct it is destined for and contains vital information such as the name of the school, municipality, cluster district and number of voters, said Smartmatic International Corporation’s Miguel Eugenio M. Avila.
Smartmatic was awarded the contract to automate the 2010 polls.
If a precinct has only 440 voters, the PCOS will only accept 440 ballots plus the votes of the Board of Election Inspectors, Avila said. Avila demonstrated the machine’s capabilities to the audience at the forum.
The PCOS accepts, scans and automatically saves a digital image of the ballot. “In the precinct level are 3 audit layers: the first is the ballot—we are still using a paper-based election system,” he said, pointing out that only genuine ballots will be scanned and deposited in transparent ballot box under the PCOS machine. The next audit layer is the image saved by the machine and the third is the printed election returns.
The third innovation is the automated canvassing of votes. The counting will not be manual and will do away with stray ballots since the candidates are properly indicated, Sarmiento pointed out.
Next is the electronic generation of election returns. The system has a printer which generates reports on thermal paper that is of higher quality than those used as cash register receipts. “The print is guaranteed to last at least 5 years under optimal conditions,” Avila said. The PCOS can generate as much as 30 copies of the election returns.
Finally, election returns are transmitted via landline, satellite or cellular technology to the Comelec backup server, the municipal/city board of canvassers, servers for dominant majority/minority parties and citizens’ groups.
Transmission to the municipal board of canvassers will only take two minutes and would be very difficult to hack. “It would take 50 years according to experts to hack the election results,” Sarmiento said.
Thus, in two hours, the winning municipality and city candidates can be proclaimed, he added.
The country has 1,628 cities/municipalities, 41,994 baranggays and 303,420 voting precincts. In 2010, voting precincts will be clustered to only 80,136.
The forum was organized by the Center of Leadership, Citizenship and Democracy of the National College of Public Administration and Governance and held 24 Sept. Other speakers were Henrietta T. De Villa, chair of the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting and the National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections and Dr. Rowena A. Cacanindin, Assistant Schools Division Superintendent of the Department of Education.
— Chi A. Ibay