Free elections for a free Philippines
If it’s good for the United Nations, it ought to be good for the Philippines.
After all criticism thrown at Smartmatic and Smarmatic-TIM, its international reputation doesn’t seem to be suffering one bit. Other countries continue to trust the company whose aim is to provide “technology for all”.
In this latest bit of news, the Republic of [...]
Bathsheba Valenzuela considers herself an expert on automated voting and scoffs at people who say that using the 25-inch-long ballot and the voting machine is fraught with difficulties for senior citizens.
“It’s easy as long as you follow the instructions. I’m 58, yes, but why would it be difficult for me?” she said after participating in a mock election conducted by GMA News at SM Mall of Asia in Pasay City.
In his book, The Opinion Makers, Moore makes the startling conclusion that pollsters “do not measure public opinion, they manufacture it.” He anchors this contention on the practice of polling firms to gloss over “voter indecision” during an election campaign. Moore notes:
Moore points out: “There is crisis in public-opinion polling today, a silent crisis that no one wants to talk about. The problem lies not in the declining response rates and increasing difficulty in obtaining representative sample, though these are issues the polling industry has to address. The problem lies, rather, in the refusal of media polls to tell the truth about those surveyed and about the larger electorate. Rather than tell us the essential facts about the public, they feed us a fairy-tale picture of a completely rational, all-knowing and fully engaged citizenry. They studiously avoid reporting on widespread public apathy, indecision and ignorance. The net result is conflicting poll results and a distortion of public opinion that challenges the credibility of the whole polling enterprise. Nowhere is this more often the case than in election polling.”
Cesar Flores, President of Smartmatic Asia Pacific said that the last 13,580 units of PCOS machines arrived at the International Container Terminal Services, Inc. (ICTSI) on February 27 completing the required number of machines to be used for the May 10 automated elections.
“We are proud to announce that all the PCOS machines are already in the Philippines, and the implementation calender is being kept as planned” Flores said.
It is rather funny that the groups who were needling Smartmatic-TIM at every stage implementing poll automation have fallen silent these days.
They kept badgering Comelec and Smartmatic-TIM for the source code, but when it was made available, these guys didn’t even apply to get a copy of the source code.
Anyway, last Friday (February 26, 2010) it was announced that all of the Smartmatic-TIM machines that will be used in the country’s first ever automated polls was arriving two days before the February 28 deadline.
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