Manual voting, counting in future elections proposed

MANILA, Philippines - After the use of manual voting in the just concluded barangay polls, former Manila mayor and now Rep. Lito Atienza of the party-list group Buhay is proposing that voting and vote counting in future national elections be done manually at the precinct level.

However, Atienza wants the transmission of votes to the municipal, city and provincial levels, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) in the case of senatorial votes and Congress in the case of presidential votes, be done electronically like in last May’s combined congressional-local polls.

He said the Automated Election Law should be amended to provide for a combination of manual and computerized election processes.

“The recently concluded barangay elections were generally peaceful and orderly, with the results known within at least five hours from the closing of the polls, and this was done using manual canvassing,” he said last Friday.

“In the past two elections using the automated election system via the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines, we witnessed how tedious and time-consuming the whole voting process became. No one saw how the votes were canvassed. This lack of transparency – where voters are effectively asked to put implicit trust in the machine that can be tampered with – erodes confidence in a fully automated system,” Atienza said.

He pointed out that under a combined manual-automated process, the community “can witness and see the counting accuracy at the precinct level.”

Atienza conceded that manual voting and counting at the precinct level would take longer and “may entail more work” than the automated system, under which ballots are fed into the PCOS and the votes are automatically counted, tabulated and then transmitted to canvassing centers.

“The tradeoff is that watchers can personally see that each vote is counted. In the case of the PCOS, once your ballot is fed into the machine, you have no way of knowing if your vote was indeed read properly and counted. You are at the mercy of the machine and the programmers,” he said.

“With the current electronic system of voting using the PCOS machines, we have no way of knowing whether our votes were indeed counted, especially after the Comelec did away with several safety features. Instead of ensuring an efficient and credible elections, the automated system has in fact made wholesale cheating even easier,” he said.

According to the Comelec, the automated balloting system is an accurate way of conducting election and counting votes.

Even the random vote count audit conducted by the Parish-Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting showed that the system is almost 100 percent accurate.