91% of Filipinos back continued automated polls —Pulse Asia poll

A great majority of Filipinos, or 91%, are in favor of  conducting automated elections in future polls, according to a recent Pulse Asia survey, results of which were released Wednesday.

The Pulse Asia nationwide poll, conducted last June 24 to 30, also revealed that 84% expressed big trust in the results of the May 2019 polls while a bigger 94% found the vote-counting machines easy to use.

Likewise, 55% or more than half of the respondents said they were able to cast their vote in less than 30 minutes.

Moreover, 84% of registered Filipino voters voted while 16% did not. Only nine percent of the 61 million registered voters were not able to cast their vote.

The top reason why people were not able to cast their vote, on the other hand, is their inability to go to their province where they are registered to vote, followed by falling ill or having to go to work.

"From the survey we did, only 6% of the 84% of registered voters who voted in the May 2019 polls experienced malfunctioning VCMs. That is a small percentage," Pulse Asia President Ronald Holmes said.

"And of those who experienced malfunctioning VCMs, 57% percent of them left their ballots to the Board of Election Inspectors [for later feeding of the ballot once the new VCM arrives], while 40% of them did not vote when told VCM is not working but returned to vote and fed their ballot to the new VCM," he added. 

Holmes said this shows that the voters "trust the system, and they want automation [of election to continue] because faster results make them find the election credible."

The Pulse Asia poll was conducted on 1,200 people.

These results painted a good picture of automated elections despite the fact that at least 961 vote counting machines (VCM) and over 1,600 Secure Digital (SD) cards malfunctioned during the May elections, delaying the voting process and resulting in long queues in polling centers.

These incidents have prompted President Rodrigo Duterte to urge the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to drop Smartmatic as supplier for VCM and look for one that is “free from fraud.”

The Random Manual Audit on the accuracy of Smartmatic-manufactured VCMs used in the May 2019 polls conducted by the Comelec and independent entities, however, showed that the VCM count is 99.9953 percent accurate—the highest since the country implemented the automated election system in 2010.

No turning back

Holmes then argued that while there were VCMs that malfunctioned, they were merely a hiccup compared to the difficulty of voting and conducting a manual election.

"One reason [in people being in favor of automated polls] is really the ease of voting. Gone are the days when the voter had to write the surname of the candidate [on the ballot], and you have to wait three weeks to find out the result, have winners proclaimed," he said.

"You don’t want to go back to the archaic system and face the problems that were address by the automated system."

Non-profit entity Democracy Watch Philippines backed the results of the Pulse Asia poll.

“We stand by the voice of the people and their trust in the electoral process,” it said in a statement.

“Automation has proved effective in addressing a decades-old problem wholesale election cheating,” it added. —KBK, GMA News