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| A voter in Catarman scans her ballot on the voting machine. Photo: ABS-CBNnews.com |
The
Philippines continues to leapfrog into the future of democracy as it
successfully held its second nationwide automated elections. The country also appears headed to become the
leading reference country for e-voting, with international observers flocking to the island nation to benchmark the elections.
The success
and the popular acclaim for the recent elections strongly indicate that e-voting
is the wave of the future in the Asian nation. The Filipino public, after
getting a taste of automation’s many benefits in 2010, have gotten used to the
speed, accuracy and transparency that e-voting brings and cannot be reasonably expected
to relinquish it.
As a matter
of fact, a few hours after the polls opened, netizens poured their sentiments
on Twitter, gushing about the painless voting experience. Some users reported
taking less than five minutes to shade ballots and cast their votes.
Even more
impressive to the public was the fact that exactly a week after the polls closed, the
Commission on Elections (Comelec) has already proclaimed 99.99% of the 18,000 elective positions including 12 senators, 229 district members of the House of Representatives, 80 provincial governors, 80 provincial vice
governors, 766 members of the provincial
legislature, 138 city mayors, 138 city vice mayors, 1,532 members of the
city council, 1,496 municipal mayors, 1,496 municipal vice mayors, and 11,972
members of the municipal council.
Anyone who has a passing interest in Philippines’ election
history, -where proclamations have been known to take as long as several months-
would instantly know this to be quite an astounding feat.
As in 2010, the backbone of the recent elections was the
Precinct Count Optical Scanner (PCOS), a machine that has gained great
popularity among Filipinos. The introduction of this machine has drastically
cut voting time -voters no longer write out candidate names but merely shade
them-. Equally important, Filipinos
seems very reassured that their votes are still committed to paper -the ballot
being an incontrovertible evidence of their choice-.
Automated elections have also made life easier for the
teachers who serve as Board of Elections Inspectors (BEI). Before automation, BEI's were known to stay in
the precincts well into the following morning manually counting the votes. Aside from the long hours, the BEI's were also
often put in harm’s way since the longer they stayed in the precinct, the more
exposed they were to election-related violence that threatened to break out any
time.
Automation changed all that. BEI's were done with their work
much sooner than in previous elections -some even packing for home an hour
after polls closed-.
But to be sure, automation is not without its detractors,
those that bible-thump a gospel of gloom and doom. Yet despite all the noise
they have created, Filipinos have wised up and realized that e-voting was
that one thing that brought political stability to the country and the resultant
economic boom.
