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June 8th, 2010 by Malayang Halalan
So, about a month after the polls closed in the Philipppine’s first ever automated elections, we have yet to know the official results from the Congressional count.
It is rather ironic that the fastest electoral count in Philippine history (all thanks to automated counting and canvassing) has been slowed down quite a bit by congressmen protesting alleged irregularities in poll automation and the tedium of a manual tally of the COCs.
In any case, the only hold up after weeks of waiting for the official Congress vetted results of the elections is the COC of Lanao del Sur and this is because it is holding special elections.
On the ears of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, it says that the Comelec has tallied 277 out of the 278 COCs and this makes for a more definite estimation of the results of the recently concluded automated polls.
Noynoy Aquino has 15,072,053 votes and Jejomar Binay has 14,501,371 votes. Noynoy beat his closest rival, Joseph Ejercito Estrada by about six million votes and Binay beat Mar Roxas by a scant 600,000 votes.
If Mar Roxas insists on challenging the results of the VP race in an electoral tribunal, he’ll probably go the way of Loren Legarda. But unlike in Loren’s case, I think the case will be more easily concluded — granting that no legal maneuver is made to manually count the votes, which would open a can of worms such as ballot appreciation.
Ballot appreciation, which means looking at each of the ballots cast in a particular precinct or precincts and on the basis of what it looks like, individual ballots may be deemed valid or invalid — nevermind if the machine that was supposed to count it accepted it or not, given the parameters of its programs.
The thesis behind a manual appreciation of the ballots is that the machines may have failed to recognize votes or erroneously recognized votes.
What Mar’s camp will most likely try to do in such a situation is to try to invalidate as many votes as possible that were cast in favor of Binay or salvage as many votes for Roxas as possible. Maybe both will be done at the same time.
Electoral protests, however fiery or insidious it may be, are no measure of the quality of success that automated elections has garnered.
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May 31st, 2010 by Malayang Halalan
Joker: Cut debates, fast-track canvass
‘Congress not board of inquiry’
By Christine Avendaño, Gil C. Cabacungan Jr.
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 00:54:00 05/31/2010
MANILA, Philippines—The counting of votes for president and vice president by Congress should be fast-tracked by doing away with long debates on the canvassing process and on allegations of electronic fraud, Sen. Joker Arroyo said Sunday.
“The people already know who the winners of the May 10 presidential and vice presidential polls are. What is lacking is the blessings of Congress and what is blocking Congress from giving its blessings is this problem (of long debates),” he said.
Arroyo underscored the need for Congress to do its duty of proclaiming the president and vice president before June 30, the last day of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in Malacañang.
He said further delays in the proclamation of the winners could lead to speculations of a military takeover. “That is the last thing we need now. We need stability, that the country is united,” he said.
No-proclamation scenario
Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile said his personal target was for a proclamation on June 15 at the earliest and on June 28 at the latest. The joint canvassing committee earlier set a deadline of June 4 for the wrapping up of the canvassing.
Enrile reiterated that he would not allow a “no-proclamation” scenario.
He said on dzBB radio that Congress would be able to do its job, pointing out that the joint canvassing committee had thought it could canvass 30 certificates of canvass (CoCs) a day, but it was able to complete 133 CoCs in just two days last week.
Several hours after the elections, the public already had a sense of who the winners in the presidential and vice presidential races were based on the electronic transmissions to the Commission on Elections (Comelec) by the counting machines.
But the Comelec stopped the tallies on May 11 after getting a warning from lawyers of presidential candidates trailing in the count that it was usurping the functions of Congress in counting the votes for the top two elective posts.
Unofficial count
In the unofficial count for the presidential race, Sen. Benigno Aquino III is leading former President Estrada by some 5.1 million votes. Makati Mayor Jejomar Binay, Estrada’s running mate, is ahead of Sen. Manuel Roxas II, Aquino’s team mate, by more than 800,000 votes.
“We should find out a means to fast-track the canvassing process,” Arroyo said.
He said the mandate of Congress, as the national board of canvassers, was to count the votes and not to be a “board of inquiry” that would hear complaints of poll fraud.
He noted that the congressional oversight committee on automated elections led by Rep. Teodoro Locsin was already looking into the poll fraud allegations.
Further delays
Despite Arroyo’s proposal, the canvassing of votes for the top two elective posts is expected to be delayed further.
The reason: Members of the joint canvassing committee of Congress are seeking another public demonstration on the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines to prove that these are tamper-proof before resuming the count.
Speaker Prospero Nograles and Enrile agreed to defer the counting of the remaining 147 CoCs out of the total of 278 until after the supplier of the machines shall have shown to Congress the machines’ security features—from voting and counting to transmission of results.
The demonstration will be done in the main session hall of the Batasang Pambansa.
“I have it on record that I wanted them at the proper time to walk us through the trail. After that, we should be convinced that the machine is tamper-proof,” Nograles said.
However, Nograles said that if the PCOS machines had been corrupted by human intervention, the ballot boxes should provide “a built-in trail or ballot images to be able to catch or follow the flow of votes up to the transmission of results in the memory card.”
“The security features will help us determine whether there is hacking or tampering or cheating by human intervention,” he said.
Nograles and Enrile agreed last week to wrap up the canvassing of the CoCs from local and overseas absentee voting before tackling the lingering questions of some members of the joint committee on alleged irregularities in the automated polls.
Resumption
Enrile said the canvassing of the votes would probably resume Wednesday to give way to Monday’s “simulation” of the PCOS machines and the ensuing debates.
“We just want to erase doubts and fears of the people,” he said of the demonstration of how the machines worked.
Enrile said he wanted people to understand the process because he believed that the results from the machines could not be intercepted.
Arroyo said on dzBB radio that if he would have his way, he did not want the PCOS demonstration or debates to take place anymore.
He said the law was clear when it said that Congress should use the electronically transmitted CoCs as the basis for proclaiming the winners.
He said that there was no need for the canvassing body to compare the electronically transmitted CoCs to the manually transmitted CoCs, as prescribed in the approved rules of the canvassing committee.
Arroyo said the document used in proclaiming the 12 senators were electronically transmitted CoCs that were counted by the Comelec.
He wondered why Congress should use two documents or use a different procedure in proclaiming the new president and vice president.
“What happens now if the two documents have different results?” Arroyo said, prompting dzBB reporter Nimfa Rogado Ravelo to say that the rules required then for the canvassing committee to go through the election returns.
Arroyo said he did not think there was a deliberate attempt to delay the canvassing and proclamation. The delays, he said, were due to some confusion on the canvassing process.
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March 12th, 2010 by Malayang Halalan
James Jimenez is the Director of Comelec’s Education and Information Department and the go-to-guy for any question about elections. He hasn’t renewed his Mensa membership but they let him keep the extra IQ points that come free when you join them.
In this bit of writing he did on Facebook, he talks about the theory of why being number one on any list makes a difference.
I guess this bit of discussion comes from the fact that Noynoy Aquino will not be number one on the 2010 election ballot, much to his dismay.
Read on, expand your mind — or what’s left of it.
Benford, shmenford
Today at 1:05am
I wish Dr. Felix Muga – an old friend from when I used to comment on Filipino Voices – could have explained Benford’s Law better to reporters. You see, ABS-CBN’s Ryan Chua quoted him.
Dr. Felix Muga, a mathematics professor at the Ateneo de Manila, cites Benford’s law in statistics, which states that “in lists of numbers from many (but not all) real-life sources of data… the first digit 1 is almost one third of the time, and larger digits occur as the leading digit with lower and lower frequency…”
Thus, if a candidate is associated with the numeral 1 or is first on the list, he or she has 30 percent more chances of “occurring” or being chosen than others. Those close to his or her name have good but lesser chances.
“The effect is usually on the undecided voters. Their tendency is to go to the number one on the list first,” Muga says.
Now, just from that snippet, it’s pretty hard to say whether it was the good Dr.Muga who gave the explanation or Mr. Chua, but it’s a deadringer for a wikipedia entry:
Benford’s law, also called the first-digit law, states that in lists of numbers from many (but not all) real-life sources of data, the leading digit is distributed in a specific, non-uniform way. According to this law, the first digit is 1 almost one third of the time, and larger digits occur as the leading digit with lower and lower frequency, to the point where 9 as a first digit occurs less than one time in twenty.
The only difference being that the first quote didn’t make sense (an editorial oversight, probably), while the second one was clear as crystal.
According to the Wikipedia, Benford’s law simply states that in many lists of numbers most of the first digits will be a one (1). Two’s are less common, three’s are even rarer, and nine’s are the least common of all. You get it, right?
Okay. So,where does it say that “Thus, if a candidate is associated with the numeral 1 or is first on the list, he or she has 30 percent more chances of “occurring” or being chosen than others. Those close to his or her name have good but lesser chances.”
That word “thus” in that quote is so misplaced because Benford’s rule apparently doesn’t support the conclusion being forcibly drawn from it. Writing a multi-digit number that starts with the number one is such a far cry from “picking the first on the list” that it boggles the mind how such a connection could even be made. That’s like a textbook non sequitur, baby. It simply does not follow.
In fact, it CANNOT follow.
The closest that Benford’s law has so far come to elections is when it was used to “hint” at possible fraud in the Iranian elections recently.
To dig deeper, Boudewijn Roukema of Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland, used a mathematical tool called Benford’s law. In many random sets of data, numbers are more likely to begin with 1 than any other digit. The next most frequent starting digit is 2, then 3 and so on, in a precise relationship. The law applies to any set of numbers scattered randomly on a logarithmic scale.
Any deviation from this pattern could suggest that figures have been manipulated. This has been used to uncover tax fraud and false expenses claims, and Roukema now says it points to fraud in the Iranian election. He analysed the vote counts reported for the four candidates in 366 districts. Votes for three of the candidates fit expected patterns, but Karroubi has an unexpectedly large number of counts beginning with the digit 7. The chance of such a large deviation from Benford’s law happening without foul play is only 0.7 per cent, Roukema says. “The simplest interpretation would be that someone interfered in the overall counts per district.”
So, to simplify: Benford’s law does not speak of the choices people make – in particular, selecting the first name on a list – rather it speaks of how numbers randomly appear on huuuuuge lists. In fact, it is precisely when human choices are introduced – as when cheaters make up fictional election results – that Benford’s law breaks down. That breakdown then becomes the indicator of fraud.
So it’s kinda irresponsible to be invoking Benford’s law to say that your candidate is disadvantaged because he isn’t number one on the list. Benford has NOTHING TO DO WITH THAT.
If I had a dirty mind, I would be so tempted to say that invoking Benford’s law is meant to take advantage of the average joe’s ignorance; meant to bludgeon him into submission with the use of magic words that he won’t understand anyway so he’ll just have to rely on the credentials of the person making the announcement – ‘after all, he did say it was based on a law of statistics, uh-huh, yessuh! Not just a theory, mind yuh, but a gosh-darned full-fledged law!’
But then I don’t have a dirty mind, so I’ll just go see how those Acosta cups are doing over at 7-11.
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March 10th, 2010 by Malayang Halalan
BY MARLEN V. RONQUILLO
Sunday Stories
www.manilatimes.net
You can’t blame the bishops for breaking tradition to endorse the presidential candidacy of Ang Kapatiran’s J.C. de los Reyes. He is young and earnest—and he looks like an overly-devoted Catholic lay leader. Dress him with a cleric garb, he would easily fit into the image of a dedicated priest.
But if he were a Spanish priest during the time of Spain’s turmoil, in the bloody war between the Republicans and the right-wing zealots of General Franco, I would say that he belongs to Franco’s devoted followers among the religious. Young maybe, but a poster child for the status quo.
Young and for the status quo? There seems to be nothing more contradictory that these two. Youth presupposes dynamism, a break with tradition, a forward-looking mind-set. But JC de los Reyes, despite his public call that Philippine politics should have an alternative, is really a creature of the status quo.
Why do I say this?
Any young politician who loves his people and cares for their future will not only support a Reproductive Health (RH) bill. He would even propose something that is more ambitious—family planning with everything there except abortion (which we really don’t do).
We belong to the planet’s top ten in child production. Our population growth outpaces important benchmarks: economic growth in real terms, yearly increase in food production, health and education investments.
This year, we will be importing a world-record of 2.4 million metric tons of rice and for this the rest of the world is crucifying us (because our massive rice imports have been jacking up rice cost in the world market). Our fraying and aging infrastructure will suffer more stress. There will be a bigger gap between demand on social overhead and actual state investments to meet the widening gap.
Our fabled natural resources, which we held infinite and always there for us, is mostly gone.
The root of all of these? The burgeoning population—which is being tacitly encouraged by bishops who harbor a fundamentalist view of reproduction. And who take “ Go forth and multiply” literally.
Amid all these, JC de los Reyes is not preaching the gospel of change and change of antediluvian mind-set.
Oh, he sounds like those right-wing nuts in the US—talking about moral values and sexual abstinence while the country is plunging into a deep recession.
Even on things earth-bound or on issues of economics, JC is completely clueless.
A bus operator-friend recently showed me a resolution from the city council of Olongapo City—which effectively bans the bus company from offering an alternative bus route between Olongapo City and Metro Manila via the SCTEX. JC de los Reyes, as a member of the city council, led the city councilors that signed the resolution.
You know the three things that JC de los Reyes and the other members of the city council invoked to ban a bus company from offering an alternative bus service? One was traffic congestion. Another was the route was saturated. The third was the crudest of all—a 1989 “verbal” agreement between then Mayor
Dick Gordon and then LTFRB Chairman Remedios Salazar-Fernando which saw no need for another bus service for the city.
For information of JC de los Reyes, who probably signed the city resolution without reading it, here are the facts:
1. The proposed alternative bus service was filed for approval in 2009, 20 years after that “verbal agreement.” So many things have changed since then, from population density, transport requirement etc.
2. The application for an alternative bus service proposes the use of the SCTEX. It will bypass the traditional route and it is an express service. It will not even affect the traditional operators there—who are probably friends of JC de los Reyes It will not even cause traffic congestion.
3. In 1989, Olongapo City was a mono-economy, dependent on a US military naval base. This was pre-Pinatubo, for God’s sake. Now, it is the 21st century.
The cruel cut in this sad incident is this: JC de los Reyes, who is offering himself as an “alternative” from traditional politics would not even recognize that times have changed radically and dramatically in Olongapo City. And there is a need for an alternative bus service.
And an alternative bus service is a break from tradition, one step for the public good, freedom from the grip of traditional operators.
JC is indeed young. But he stands for the status quo, if not the discredited old ways of doing things.
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March 9th, 2010 by Malayang Halalan
LP offers experts’ help to remove Acosta name
Comelec says it can’t reformat software
By KRIS BAYOS, RAYMUND ANTONIO
March 8, 2010, 4:04pm
The camp of Senator Benigno Simeon “Noynoy” Aquino III said the Commission on Elections (Comelec) has no reason not to exclude the embattled Vetallano Acosta from the official roster of presidential candidates after the Liberal Party (LP) offered the services of the party’s information technology experts to help reformat the software that will run the precinct count optical scans (PCOS) machines that will be used in the May 10 elections.
Although disappointed with the Comelec’s belated decision to disqualify the Kilusang Bagong Lipunan standard bearer, Aquino’s spokesperson, Edwin Lacierda said the LP is willing to help the Comelec control the damage it has done to the candidacy of the LP standard bearer.
It was recalled that the LP has been questioning Acosta’s qualification to the presidential race when his supposed running mate, TV host Jay Sonza, and the son of the KBL stalwart and former dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Leyte Rep. Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. have disowned him.
The LP claimed that Acosta’s inclusion in the list is part of a grand scheme to dislodge Senator Aquino as the first in the list of presidential candidates in the official ballot, and to allot the last column for his toughest contender to the race, Nacionalista Party’s Senator Manuel “Manny” Villar Jr. alone.
The Comelec did not heed the LP’s contention until it finally disqualified Acosta in a decision it released last Thursday. But despite the Comelec’s decision, Comelec Law Deparment chief Ferdinand Rafanan said it is too late to exclude Acosta from the list of presidential candidates after some nine million ballots have been printed.
Lacierda said that “if the Comelec is on top of the situation, it should face this issue squarely whatever it takes. It is their obligation to face the consequence of their late decision in fairness to Senator Aquino. Justice and fairness dictate that the Comelec should stop complaining and just do it,” Lacierda said.
Lacierda added that the LP is willing to send its IT personnel to help the Comelec reformat the software meant to run the PCOS machine. He also said the Comelec, only “if they have the political will,” can also reprint the ballots by using the resources provided for them under the law.
“It is only a question of reformatting. How difficult can that be if we are willing to offer the services of our IT personnel to help the Comelec? If they can’t do it, we will do it for them. We are willing to send our people to work under the Comelec’s supervision,” Lacierda added.
If the Comelec insists on retaining Acosta in the previously printed and to be printed ballots, Lacierda claimed it will only add up to the public’s doubt on the efficiency of the agency and the success of the first ever automated elections in the country.
Meanwhile, the poll body insisted that it could no longer change the face of the ballots even as the LP can send IT experts to reformat the system to clear Acosta’s name from the list.
“This is the reason we are inviting them to visit the NPO (National Printing Office) so they will understand the process. And if they have queries, they should come to us to discuss the matter,” Comelec Commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal said in an interview.
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