By Oscar A. Gomez Jr.
Computerworld Philippines
July 21, 2009
As a one-year countdown starts for next year’s presidential elections, the groundbreaking deployment of modern voting machines nationwide has gone under a microscope—and public scrutiny is expected to grow even tighter as the May polls near.
During a recent live demonstration of voting machine technology – an exercise to nudge Congress into green-lighting the P11.3 billion needed to automate elections in 2010 – lawmakers were alternately skeptical and antsy about the whole thing.
Some grumbled aloud why those mysterious “source codes” could not be handed over to be examined by their staff. One congressman demanded that the machines be encased in “see-through” fiberglass. He insisted that everyone must have a clear view of how “electronic counting and tabulation” works.
Nobody knows whether it was technophobia, or political survival instincts, that reigned in the hallowed and august chamber that day. But the post-election scenario may yet solve another persistent riddle about the Filipinos’ highly partisan ways. Pinoy voters will find out if an automated election system is what finally convinces losers that they really lost.
With all those machines, maybe election results can be extremely close and yet regarded as fair by all.
When public anxiety grew over electoral results that could no longer be trusted, that’s when new voting technologies emerged. A crisis of confidence was averted in South America and Europe, where a speedier tabulation of results apparently helped preserve some of those continents’ larger democracies.
But today, in the grandest showcase of democracy, poll automation has put many citizens in a dilemma. Bitter controversies surround the reported failures across the United States of modern touch-screen voting machines, in particular. Concerned groups wonder whether a return to regular paper ballots will be the only guarantee of a fair vote count to protect the essence of their democracy.
The US experience is instructive for Philippine election officials as they get up to speed on the science of electronic voting and canvassing. America has come a long way from the days of paper-ballot voting in the 19th century, writes technology journalist Clive Thompson in the New York Times.
“Ballot-box stuffing — and inept poll workers who lost bags of votes — led many to abandon that system. Some elections officials next adopted lever machines, which record each vote mechanically. But lever machines have problems of their own, not least that they make meaningful recounts impossible because they do not preserve each individual vote,” Thompson wrote.
Consequently, beginning in the 1960s, lever machines were widely replaced by punch-card systems, in which voters knock holes in ballots that could be stored for a recount. Punch cards worked for decades without controversy – until, of course, the electoral fiasco of 2000.
During the Florida recount of the 2000 Bush-Gore election, it became clear that punch cards had a tragic flaw: “hanging chads” created when thousands of voters failed to punch a hole cleanly through the ballot. This turned the recount into a torturous argument over “voter intent.” On top of that, many voters confused by the infamous “butterfly ballot” mistakenly picked the wrong candidate. For weeks the results of the presidential election was kept hanging by a legal brawl over how and whether the recounts should be conducted. When the US Supreme Court ruled that then Texas Gov. George W. Bush had edged Vice President Al Gore by 537 votes in the state, Florida gave Bush the presidency, but this election was never settled in the mind of the public.
In 2002, in reaction to the uproar over irregularities in Florida’s presidential balloting, the US Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). The law created minimum election standards and allotted nearly $3 billion to states to upgrade voting equipment and improve voter registration databases for better election administration. (The following year, the federal government created the Election Assistance Commission to help states implement new election standards.) Now come media reports that as early as 2007, hundreds of millions of dollars went to the purchase touch-screen systems that many states are now scrapping because of concerns about their security and reliability.
Filipinos for sure have had their share of similar traumas (Hello Garci, Sulo Hotel operations, and dagdag-bawas all come to mind). These experiences, in the view of many, have caused irreparable harm to the integrity of the nation’s “Third World” electoral system.
GUNPOWDER SMELLS
On Aug. 23, 2008, in what was billed as a dry-run for nationwide automation, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) ran two different electronic voting systems in parallel for the scheduled election of officials in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM).
The country’s first attempt at modernizing elections was successful from the voters’ points of view, according to a post-election survey in ARMM by Social Weather Stations (SWS) commissioned by Asia Foundation. Out of 900 ARMM adults polled, 84% said the election process was improved — 42% said “definitely,” and another 42% said “probably” — by automation. On the other hand, 12% said the process probably did not improve, and 3% said it got worse. The sample had 100 respondents in each of the areas of Basilan, Tawi-Tawi, Sulu, Lanao del Sur, Marawi City and Shariff Kabunsuan, where voters marked their choices on ballots that were later fed into Optical Mark Reader (OMR) counting machines. The sample also had 300 respondents in Maguindanao, where voters chose their candidates on Direct Recording Equipment (DRE). Opinions were equally favorable in OMR and DRE areas.
The ARMM election did much to erase the stigma against Comelec after its sloppy 2007 attempt to computerize polls under disgraced ex-chair Benjamin Abalos. What had been shaping up as the first automated election didn’t materialize when the Supreme Court voided the automation vendor’s P1-billion contract because of serious bidding flaws.
Comelec has bounced back ever since and helping it earn a fresh respect is the solid reputation among NGOs and election watchdogs of its new chairman, retired Supreme Court Justice Jose Melo. Furthermore the commission has a credible public face and savvy communicator (he blogs!) in the intelligent young lawyer James Jimenez.
Early in 2009, the commission was beginning to feel the stress of concern that automation wasn’t moving fast enough despite enactment of Republic Act No. 9369, or the new Automated Elections, and the ARMM test runs. Jimenez fretted in his New Year’s Day blog entry: “It’s almost here: the year before what might turn out to be the most important elections in recent memory. Just thinking about all the things that need to be done gives me hives.”
He wondered aloud, too, why the Department of Budget and Management had apparently sat on the Comelec’s supplemental budget proposal, which DBM needed to transmit to Congress before the holiday recess. “This obviously impacts automation timetables and nothing will be quite as screwed as Voter Ed (education). Again,” he lamented.
In his Web log, Jimenez rued further that “everything is hanging on so many variables: Will we get the money? Will we get it on time? Will we have enough time to adequately customize the machines? Will we have time to satisfactorily work out the kinks? Well, at least, there’s still some time left to take a deep breath.”
“Too bad,” he sighed, “the air already reeks of gunpowder.”
It was fortunate that nothing resembling a shootout in the slightest would happen. Instead, senators and congressmen even broke partisan lines to reach a nearly unanimous vote in both chambers, therefore shepherding the supplementary automation budget into law by mid-March. The commission knew better than to waste this overwhelming goodwill. Within the same week, it announced the details (“terms of reference”) for bidders who wanted to manage and supply voting hardware and systems across the archipelago. Ten firms handed over P1-million, non-refundable checks to Comelec for a crack at the gargantuan project, which will be awarded to the winning bidder on May 21. Foreign and local firms alike were encouraged by the swift approval of such a sizeable public allocation – a powerful display of determination by the government, with prodding from different sectors, to do what it takes to make next year’s voting quicker and more accurate.
The P11.3-billion request won’t all go to leasing the 80,000 laptop computers and counting machines required (one pair per precinct). It also goes to hiring technical manpower, training election officers down to the precinct level, educating voters, conducting road shows and securing telecommunication equipment and leased facilities for the electronic transmission of poll results.
“We see this as a new day dawning for genuine democracy and the true reflection of the people’s will,” remarked Quezon City Rep. Nanette Castelo-Daza, a vice chair of the House committee on appropriations. “For those who are overwhelmed by the huge cost to guarantee a credible democratic exercise, I ask them to ponder as well the stiff price of chaos, widespread election anomalies, never-ending protests and ultimately the subversion of the people’s true will.”
Comelec officials assure that the optical mark reader or OMR technology they recommended (see related story on page ___) was chosen after exhaustive tests and comparison with other methods. OMR was stress-tested both in the lab and in the field during the recent ARMM elections. The commission is confident with the integrity of the OMR method, where voters will indicate their choices by shading boxes on security-printed ballots that are then fed to desktop-size counting machines by the voters themselves.
Poll officials detailed the technology’s numerous security features against fraud, computer hacking (a possibility that disturbed lawmakers the most), or even sabotage. Among these features were the ability to audit or recount the individual physical ballots if necessary; the automatic scanning and storage of every ballot’s image in a hard disk in encrypted form; the distinct bar code on every single ballot that eliminates the possibility of duplication and double counting; and the encryption of all other data to assure that they cannot be altered nor retrieved without a password-protected smart card. These smart cards are for the exclusive use of the board of election inspectors at the precinct level and no other personnel – not even the system vendor’s computer technicians – will be allowed to encode anything on the laptop PC attached to each voting machine.
The speed of transmitting results to the national tallying center will be one of the most dramatic innovations, as Comelec intends to deploy counting machines right inside the voting precincts. By the commission’s reckoning, there will be one vote counting machine dedicated for every 1,000 registered voters.
In the ARMM elections, according to Comelec, the fastest results coming from Sharif Kabunsuan province were announced after 36 hours. Other places took even longer because of the island-to-island transport of ballots, since actual electronic counting of ballots was done in provincial counting centers.
With precinct-level automation, Comelec expects to receive results a lot faster than ARMM canvassers did, which leaves virtually no time to operate the usual machinations or so-called wholesale cheating.
EARLY WARNINGS
During next year’s presidential elections, therefore, all votes will be cast on paper ballots which will be counted in the OMR machines favored by Comelec over the DRE or touch-screen voting machines. As already mentioned, these two technologies were deployed in parallel in ARMM.
One IT expert justifies the Comelec’s choice: “If the presidential race is extremely close and some of the voting machines happen to crash, voters might learn to accept a presidency decided by a paper ballot recount than by a vote count that existed only on a computer drive.”
Comelec chair Melo told a television interview that the commission’s choice of technology came down to the type of machine that would give voters some assurance that their ballots could be looked at a second time if necessary.
Beyond selecting the best vendor for this type of voting equipment, Comelec is making sure it fulfills RA No. 9369 which mandates a pre-election testing of every machine, random post-election audits, and a strict chain of custody of the machines to prevent tampering.
While the commission has established standards for the type of electronic voting machines it will use, it is still in the process of determining when and how to test those machines.
The same IT expert suggested that “Comelec’s avowed transparency in the bidding process” must also extend to the process of testing the equipment. “A lack of rigorous government testing can only fuel some voters’ distrust of the machines, especially amid some perceptions that they are vulnerable to hacking.”
Warnings have been received from IT groups like the Computer Professionals Union (CPU) and TransparentElections.org, and even from a well-respected former Comelec head, Christian Monsod, a CPU member, that if not done properly, automated elections may result in large scale cheating.
“We are very grateful that many groups are coming forward to air their concerns,” Comelec spokesman Jimenez says. “In fact, if you read their statement you will see that they are not against automation per se, but are merely raising warning flags – identifying aspects of the project that are most vulnerable.”
Jimenez pointed out that the CPU also categorically stated that it is still possible to create a suitable automated election system (AES) which the people can trust, but that “it should be reviewed by a large number of independent security experts with knowledge in computer security and cryptography. The source code of the system should be open and available to the public. This will allow all interested and technically-adept individuals and groups to scrutinize the functions of the system. It should have voter-verifiable audit trails for reference.”
Under RA No. 9369, it is mandatory for the source code to be opened to review, Jimenez clarified, “just like the CPU is recommending. There are other recommendations from the group, and I would like to reassure them that most of those recommendations are already part and parcel of the project.”
“We are inviting interested groups to coordinate with us,” Jimenez said, “regarding their concerns. We welcome the opportunity to work together with them in pursuit of our common goal to ensure clean, honest, and orderly elections in 2010.”
Jimenez pointed out that most of the preparations that are needed to be done soon spin off from automation, much of which will revolve around voter education. That means trying to generate public acceptance for the system and making sure voters know how to use the technology.
“But,” he admits, “that’s still a whole lot of work.”
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