from: www.inquirer.net

this article is written by retired SC chief justice artemio panganiban

With Due Respect
By Artemio V. Panganiban
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 22:33:00 01/16/2010


MANILA, Philippines—I was advised not to worry about the delays in the “physical” preparations for the 2010 polls and the logistical nightmares I wrote about last week. I was assured that Comelec has contingency plans to manually count the automated ballots.

Inadequate contingency plans. With due respect, I believe these plans are sorely inadequate. For example, if the wrong automated ballots are delivered to the wrong town, all the voters there would be disenfranchised because the candidates printed on the ballots cannot be voted for in that town. Ballots tailored for Cagayan de Oro are useless if delivered to Cagayan province. Here, the contingency plan will not work because there are no automated ballots to count.

Both the automated ballots and the PCOS are precinct-specific. They must be delivered to the correct town at the correct time. Delivering them too early or too late will risk their safekeeping and integrity. Up to today, the couriers for these ballots and the PCOS have yet to be chosen.

Another example. This week, Comelec started to disqualify many candidates. But the Supreme Court may reverse Comelec, as it recently did with Ang Ladlad. Consequently, it cannot order the printing of the automated ballots till after all appeals are decided. Appeals take time to mature.

Since there are 47 million voters, at least 47 million ballots must be printed by special printing machines, which—unfortunately again—have not all been procured. There are 1,630 different versions of the ballot because each of the 1,630 towns in the country has different candidates. The contingency plan is useless if Comelec fails to print correctly and on time all the different ballots.

Final example. Comelec purchased 82,000 PCOS machines, which need to be calibrated into 1,630 different ways to read the 1,630 types of ballots to be printed. To date, only 30,000 of them have been delivered to Comelec. When tested, the machines accepted only 30 out of the 600 ballots inserted. That is a measly 5-percent passing rate. Yet during the bidding process, Comelec required 99.999-percent accuracy! When a new jet crashes during its test flight, no explanation can convince passengers to ride the next plane. How then can I be persuaded that the PCOS will work properly during the real run?

There are many other examples, like warlords “back hoeing” the ballots, early voters spilling water on the machines, etc. My point is: Imagine these scenarios repeated in several provinces and districts. And any plain folk would see a failure of proclamation for president, vice president and senators when the votes in all those failed areas will be determinative of the final results for these offices.

I know the many objections against the super-slow old manual system. But our common dream of automating our elections is fading due to delays and untested logistical nightmares. It is better to deal with an old known evil than a new unknown devil.