Automation can only worsen election fraud
Pending before the Commission on Elections are bids from private contractors to automate voting. Exasperated by the slow counting of ballots—along with the cheating that accompanies the process—many Filipinos are clamoring for electoral reform. Automation is now seen as the panacea to the stubborn disease of election fraud.Some Filipinos, however, warn that automating the vote count can only make things worse. One of them is Roberto Verzola, ironically an information technology expert.
Verzola is described as a pioneer in the local desktop computing and Internet scene. In 1982 he built the first Filipino computer. In 1991 he set up the first online systems at both chambers of Congress. Later he was awarded by industry the title of “Father of Philippine Email.”
Yet, it is because Verzola is an IT icon that he knows only too well how automation could make election cheating easier. Verzola is not just an engineer; he is also a convener of the election watchdog Halalalang Marangal, which monitored irregularities in the last polls.
Verzola writes in an online article: “The misfocused objective of ‘minimizing human intervention’ will result in fewer instead of more witnesses when fraud does occur making it easier for cheats to cover up their crime once they break the system.”
In many proposals to automate elections the public will not be able to witness the vote count. They will only be shown the totals after the automated canvass is done. The result: loss of transparency.
Flawed assumptions
The automation proposals are based on what Verzola calls flawed assumptions:
• Automation eliminates human intervention. “It will not,” says Verzola. “Automation can only reduce, but never eliminate, human intervention. Automated systems will always have points of human intervention…”
Vezola points out: “Reducing human intervention can actually work in favor of the cheats, who will now need to recruit fewer accomplices and deal with fewer potential witnesses to the fraud.”
• Automation minimizes if not eliminates cheating. “It can do no such thing,” says Verzola. “If they work as intended, automated machines can only: a) speed things up, and b) follow more faithfully the instructions of those who program them. If they are reprogrammed to cheat, the machines will follow the new instructions just as faithfully and quickly.”
• Safeguards can prevent cheats from manipulating an automated system. “This is an illusion,” says Verzola. “Cheats can master automation technologies as well as anybody else. Sooner or later they will be able to identify the system’s weak points and break it.”
• The main cause of cheating is the slow manual count. “This confuses the symptom for the disease,” Verzola writes. “Obviously, cures based on wrong diagnoses will probably be wrong too.”
Actually, counting at the precincts is not slow. For the most part, it is over within several hours. Moreover, the precinct count is the most transparent part of the whole process.
“Here, like the audience in a basketball game, the public can see each vote counted and the candidates’ score updated, vote by vote,” Verzola says. “Cheating that occurs at this level often involves brazen, in-your-face kind of acts that no machine can stop and no cheat can hide.”
Maximize transparency
Verzola is not entirely against election automation, however. What he does propose is “not to minimize human intervention but to maximize transparency, or the ability of interested third-parties and the public in general to double-check and audit the system.”
He points out a proposal to use digital imaging technologies to make more copies of election returns at the precinct level. “The more copies of the ERs circulate the more difficult for cheats to cover-up their crime.”
A systems expert has suggested LCD projectors at the municipal level. “Projecting ERs on a big screen enables more people in the audience to audit the ongoing canvass,” Verzola says.
In last May’s midterm elections, Halalang Marangal conducted a “citizen’s tally,” which asked nonpartisan volunteer precinct watchers to use cell phones to text the results to the watchdog’s databases.
“Once they adopt ‘maximizing transparency’ rather than ‘minimizing human intervention’ as objective, technical experts can no doubt come up with even better schemes,” Verzola says.
“Unfortunately,” Verzola says, “the attention of Congress has been focused on hardware-intensive proposals that will not only waste our scarce resources automating the most transparent portion of the whole electoral process but may even make it easier for future cheats to cover up their manipulation of the results.”
Besides—although Verzola did not say so—hardware-intensive options, which cost billions of pesos, to automate elections are where the proverbial killing could be made. Wink, wink.
