INDEED, WITH the serious allegations of systematic and massive cheating in the 2004 elections continuing to hound President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, it does seem the Philippines has only come full circle. And 20 years after public outrage over electoral fraud spawned Edsa 1, and despite the benefits of information technology, the electoral system has remained untouched by modernity.

	DR. WILLIAM TORRES Photo by Lilen Uy

Like many who advocate for genuine electoral reforms, Torres strongly believes the electoral process has to be fixed if the public is to influence the direction of governance in the country. "If you don't have a good electoral process," he says, "how can you guarantee the election of public officials that the people want?" Like many others in the technology sector and indeed, most everywhere else, Torres believes that "the electoral system must be changed."

From the standpoint of systems and technology, what the Comelec had intended to do in 2004 — capturing the votes on paper, counting the ballots through a machine, and transmitting the results centrally via the satellite system — was already good. But the process still remained vulnerable to fraud with cheats finding all sorts of ways to thwart it.

Torres himself counsels against employing a mere technological solution. "I don't think you can solve a social problem using only technology," he says. "Technology must go together with human processes. It is really how the human system makes use of the technological system that will change things."

Yet he does regret the failed reinvention of the NCC that he was proposing at the time when Cory Aquino's signature still had the force of law. He says Malacañang had already made a commitment to look at his proposal, but that it was sidelined at the last minute by other matters. "I think it was agrarian reform or something like that," he says, "and I agree it was more important."

Torres also points out that many other important things went undone. While such failings could be attributed to the lack of sufficient time to address everything or that people were not moving quick enough, in many cases, he says, vested interests came into the picture and slowed things down.

Torres may have very well been referring to the present. A case in point is VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), which got congressional approval recently but which could have been started two or three years ago.

For sure major gains have been achieved in the information technology field, with the success of call centers and business-process outsourcing ventures. But the sector — and the rest of the country, really — could have done much more in the last 20 years. Says Torres, almost sighing: "We don't have the kind of leadership to make things boil, simmer, and then cooked." — Alecks P. Pabico