Philippine poll watchdog greenlights security of e-voting system ahead of elections

 

An influential election watchdog group in the Philippines has assured voters of the security of the country’s automated elections system, ahead of the May 2022 elections.

“We have come a long way in terms of technological advancements in the way we vote. Our automated system is a big improvement over the old manual system,” said noted IT-professional Henry Aguda, a trustee of the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV), in an online voter education seminar.

PPCRV is a church-based citizen’s group which has been keeping watch over Philippine elections for three decades. It has over 500,000 volunteers all over the country.

PPCRV is a church-based citizen’s group which has been keeping watch over Philippine elections for three decades. It has over 500,000 volunteers all over the country. The Philippines started automating their elections in 2010 and since them the PPCRV has validated all election results.

Responding to questions during the webinar, Aguda said that the vote counting machine (VCM) lessens the possibility of electoral fraud. “We have experts who have seen how the source code is secure and how encryptions have been done,” he said.

Aguda further cited that VCMs run software that has been “meticulously developed for the purpose of counting votes.” He also cited the machine’s capability to detect duplicate or fake ballots, flag ballots intended for other machines, as well as other components of security such as the physical i-button keys held by poll workers.

“Our machines are very secure,” Aguda said, adding that “I cannot imagine somebody successfully rigging an election through the machines.”

Dr. William Yu, who is also an IT-professional and a trustee of the poll watchdog group reminded voters that the automated election system is a system. “It is important to recognize that this is a system. The VCM is secure but there are other things — the process, the i-buttons keys that are also part of the overall security,” he said.

“If you want to break the system you have to break all of those. And it’s not just the machine, you will also have to compromise all the people on the site, the volunteers,” he said.

Yu also dismissed the idea of a rouge vote counting machine being used to cheat.

“In case there is a shadow VCM or ghost VCM that is in the system, we should be able to track it down with our parallel count process. Not only are there controls within the system itself, but there are also controls that we as poll watchers are able to do,” Yu said.

As a way to further increase transparency of the system, Yu is advocating to increase the number of precincts that are audited in every Philippine election. The post-election audit performed is known as the random manual audit (RMA). “It always helps to have more checks and balances,” he said.

As a way to further increase transparency of the system, Yu is advocating to increase the number of precincts to be subjected to the random manual audit (RMA). “It always helps to have more checks and balances,” he said.

The RMA shows an increasing match between the electronic count and the manual count since 2010 when the Philippines started automating its elections. In 2010 it was 99.580%, 2013 -99.9474%, 2016 - 99.9027%, and 2019 - 99.9953%.

Null votes, slow count and fraud allegations underscore need for electoral reforms in Peru

 

Left-wing candidate Pedro Castillo appears to be headed to victory in one of Peru’s most divisive elections ever. Yet his rival Keiko Fujimori is disputing the count, calling for the nullification of some 300,000 ballots for alleged anomalies, enough to potentially erase the slim 70,000 vote margin of Castillo.

While Fujimori’s allegations have yet to gain widespread support, with international election observers seemingly inclined to give the elections a clean bill of health, the same observers have cautioned against prematurely dismissing the claims.

After saying that they have "observed a positive electoral process" and that the “The Mission has not detected serious irregularities,” observers from the Organization of American States were quick to urge authorities to wait until challenges to the vote have been resolved before calling a winner.

At the very least, many believe that this should prompt Peruvian authorities to initiate reforms to stave off potential crises in similarly tightly contested elections.

The list of complaints, which seem to correspond with known weaknesses of the manual system, include lack of signatures on tallies, arithmetic mistakes, and doubts on whether a vote was properly marked in a ballot.

In a press conference, Fujimori and her lawyers claimed to have discovered proof of forged signatures on more than 500 ballot tallies, plus other anomalies, imputing such on the Free Peru party, to which Castillo belongs.

Experts have long warned against human intervention of any sort in elections, whether the hand counting of ballots or reliance on physical signatures to verify tallies. In recent years, manual elections have increasingly been regarded as being prone to errors, if not outright fraud. In fact, the idea of reducing human intervention has been a powerful impetus behind the shift by countries from manual to automated elections.

Moreover, the number of null votes in this Peruvian election cycle is cause for concern. While a lot of voters might have intentionally left their ballots blank in protest, the potential for disenfranchisement is alarming.

In the last three Peruvian elections (the first round of this year’s presidential and both rounds of the 2016 presidential elections), null votes surpassed 5% of total number of ballots cast. This translates to more than 1 million voters which were potentially disenfranchised because they “marked incorrectly their ballot”. In a contest separated by just 70,000 votes, this could easily spark a crisis.

Even more tellingly, the slow pace of the vote count has created the very conditions for this heightened political tension. While countries which use automation technology regularly expect to know their next leaders just a few hours after the polls close, a week has already passed without the Peru vote having been completely counted.

Peru finds itself at a crossroads -- stay with the flawed manual elections and risk a potentially disastrous outcome down the road, or start exploring ways to modernize its elections and take its fledgling democracy to a new level of stability.