Challenges to poll automation: Matching ballots and precincts
Getting the right ballots to the right polling precinct
Philippine poll automation has been severely challenged and beset with questions that indicate doubt rather than interest.
While it has already gotten past the first Supreme Court petition questioning the legality of Smartmatic-TIM’s bid to supply the Comelec with an automated election system, the questions now revolve around not only whether it will indeed deliver the 82,000 machines to every polling precinct — but more importantly, will the right ballots be delivered to the right precinct.
Perhaps still unknown to most, each machine will be programmed to read and accept a specific number of ballots that carry bar-codes which pair it with a specific machine. This means that each machine will only read and accept ballots that are assigned to it, it will not accept ballots for other machines or precincts.
This is a security feature is intended to prevent one voting machine or several voting machines from being used to cast votes for one candidate or another using pre-shaded ballots.
In a system where each precinct automated voting machine is assigned a specific set of ballots, what will happen if the wrong set of ballots are delivered to a precinct?
Certain disaster, for sure. This is almost assured as the automated voting machine rejects one ballot after the other. Just at what point the BEIs or Smartmatic-TIM personnel will step in figure out why a certain number of ballots are being rejected is crucial. At what point will they be able to detect if the wrong ballots are being used in the precinct? More importantly, how soon can they find out where the right ballots are and retrieve that?
In any case, wrong ballots are delivered to the wrong precinct, we can guess rightly that at least two precincts will each have a set of disenfranchised voters.
If you still have a problem figuring out what this means, you have to think of what parcel delivery services do.
There are various modes prevalent in the Philippines like bus station to bus station deliveries and door-to-door deliveries — where there is really no assurance at all that the parcels being delivered at moving towards the right place. Then there are services like FedEx, 2-Go, and others which rely on various kinds of technologies not only to ensure that the right parcel is sent to the right address but also to check on its process as well as confirm if it was delivered to the right address.
There are parcel delivery companies that actually equip their delivery personnel with a GPS based machine. Once delivered to the address, the delivery personnel uses a machine to send an electronic message to their office that is coded with the specific latitude and longitude of the delivery address. The recipient, in certain instances, is asked to confirm the delivery using the same machine.
The Comelec sees the value of using this GPS technology but only to track the automated counting machines that will be used BUT NOT THE BALLOTS.
This still leaves a serious gap. The machines may be in the right precinct, but will the right ballots be there also?
Jarius Bondoc has exposed this serious challenge to poll automation.
After months of dawdling the Comelec finally decided. GPS (global positioning system) is the best technology to security-track in real time the 82,200 automated vote counters and special ballot boxes. Bar coding and RFID (radio frequency identification) simply won’t work. Poll monitors need to know where each counter is, from delivery, warehousing and test-run in Manila, to deployment to assigned precinct cluster, actual Election Day run, back to stockroom. Similarly, each box needs to be charted, from the National Printing Office for ballot loading, to transport to precincts for matching with counters, election use, transfer to municipal canvassing and, lastly, storage as paper trails of the electronic count. Too many loopholes bug bar coding and RFID. Counters and boxes can get stolen once deviated from designated routes. But GPS keeps track every second via see-all satellite, up to one-meter increments. It’s costlier, but can save the day for the country’s first nationwide automated polls. No more Lintang Bedols diverting boxes for burning, or Congress guards stuffing in fake ballots.
So the Comelec is now conducting a “public bidding” for the GPS supplier — in utter secrecy. The only word about it is that two bidders are participating. Perhaps that’s the reason some commissioners are confused.
Take Commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal. Last week he announced that GPS would be used to track ballot boxes from the precinct count to municipal canvass. Huh, why only that phase, and what about the counters?
Worse, he depicted the work thus. Tens of thousands of Comelec volunteers will check with handheld barcode readers the arrival of the boxes at the municipalities. So where’s the vaunted GPS there?
Either the secrecy of proceedings confounded Larrazabal or someone fed him lies — someone who already has contracted a barcode instead of GPS supplier.
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