IN CONTRAST to all these, all that the Comelec could amount to technologically, besides a content-impoverished website, was a tool to assist voters in locating their voting precincts on the Internet. A joint project with the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) and the IT company Cybersoft, FindPrecinct.com launched into cyberspace less than a week prior to Election Day. Though a laudable effort, its search capabilities were limited to Metro Manila and other key cities. Given the chaos of disenfranchised voters complaining about missing precincts in many polling areas during the elections, it was doubtful if the search tool had any significant impact at all.

Misplaced or not, most of the blame for the latest elections bedlam fell on the government—in particular, the Comelec and its modernization committee headed by Commissioner Luzviminda Tangcanco. Critics note that the poll body had three years since the enactment of the Election Automation Law, otherwise known as Republic Act 8436, to work on the full automation of the 2001 elections.

At the very least, critics say, there shouldn't have been any need for a quick count, such as the one by Namfrel, had the Comelec tried to accomplish the seemingly simpler task set by the law. Augusto Lagman, chief of Namfrel's IT systems, avers that with computerized elections official results would be known in a few days. By then, quick counts would become the task of media groups, leaving Namfrel to focus its energies on its regular pollwatching duties.

But as things went, the Comelec deferred its modernization project, citing logistical and funding reasons. In fact, no allocations were proposed in its budget to cover the purchase of ballot-counting machines. Its modernization scheme instead prioritized voter registration, alloting P1.5 billion for a tamper-proof voters' ID system, or the Voter Registration and Identification System (VRIS). Yet even this got shelved for alleged irregularities that went into the bidding of the contract, which was awarded to Photokina Marketing Corp for submitting the lowest bid price of P6.5 billion.

Here, as elsewhere, there is a growing clamor to rescue an imperfect election process with the help of technology. But obviously, the Philippines is nowhere near what the others have already had, and is unlikely to even start thinking of what other countries now want. In the United States, Americans want online voting instituted, especially in the light of the fiasco in Florida due to what to them are antiquated systems during the 2000 presidential elections. General elections in the United Kingdom this month will be held online for the first time. The Estonian government is set to introduce electronic voting in its election laws in anticipation of the 2003 parliamentary elections. France also has a pending bill seeking to initiate cyberelections as a way of arresting low voter turnout.

Filipinos may find some comfort in the fact that while online voting may be the wave of the future, it is viewed with guarded optimism even by those who have already had a taste of it. First, there are the inherent security, privacy and reliability problems. One concern is how to check if the person voting is really the person he says he is. Another is the network's susceptibility to attacks by politically motivated hackers. Some also say that no online technology can prevent the threat of coercion—of being pressured to cast one's vote in view of one another—in a remote Internet voting environment.

And there is the usual apprehension about aggravating existing inequalities, given a gaping digital divide between those who own computers with Internet access and those who don't. For the Philippines, such a situation is starkly perilous in the aftermath of the violent May 1 protest and a highly divisive electoral exercise. Yet where technology is able to facilitate improvements in the life of a democracy and empower its citizens, then those changes—as the automation of the counting and canvassing of votes—ought to become embedded in its processes and institutions.

Copyright © 2001 All rights reserved.
PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM