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A lesson for Comelec, UP pulls off automated polls


Six years ago, the idea of automated elections for student council posts in the University of the Philippines in Diliman was unimaginable, at least for me. It wasn’t necessarily because we couldn’t muster the technology and logistics, but because there was simply neither a need nor a clamor for paperless voting. A lot of things have changed since then, and automated elections are no longer a thing of the past in UP Diliman. Now on its second year, and notwithstanding minor glitches in the system, electronic voting has proven to be a worthy improvement in one of the basic democratic processes in modern society. I got to UP a little past 2 p.m. last February 24, the day of the student council election this year. As a registered graduate student, I had made sure to drop by the campus to cast my votes, my first time to participate in the automated system on a university-wide scale. Armed with only my UP ID and registration form, I went to my college not knowing what to expect. There was already a long queue outside the designated voting center at the College of Arts and Letters. Some students were waiting for their names to be located on the list, while others were waiting for their turn at the computer terminals. There were no paper ballots or ballot boxes in sight.

Instructions were scribbled on the room’s whiteboard. Voters need their student number as their username; the election officer then issues a stub containing the voter’s case-sensitive password. Using the information, student voters log into the system, and an electronic ballot that contains the names of the candidates – classified according to their positions and political parties – pops up on the screen. Voters have to check the boxes opposite the names of their preferred candidates for student council posts, both at the university and college levels. An “abstain" box can also be ticked if voters prefer not to vote for any candidate in any position. Voters can make changes until they are satisfied with their choices, and then press the “Confirm ballot" button. They are prompted to enter a captcha (a computer-generated code) to finally save their ballot, and are automatically logged out of the system afterwards. Voters may still log back in to verify their choices or view their ballots, but the system will no longer allow any modifications. Free ice cream Voting in the UP Diliman elections is that simple and easy. I was done in a matter of minutes, especially because I had decided on my choices beforehand. Using the issued stub where the password is indicated, I could even avail of free ice cream outside the college building, an apparent effort to encourage higher voter turnout. Known in the past for its high level of activism, the country’s premier state university has suffered dwindling political involvement in recent years and student apathy has become a growing concern. However, whether the automation of elections would eventually encourage a higher voter turnout or not remains to be seen. Statistics have not been conclusive so far. Less than 43 per cent of more than 20,000 students voted in last year’s elections, the first time it was done at the university level. Before that, 45 per cent voted when elections were not yet automated. This year’s turnout was higher than last year’s, but only by a fractional percentage: 43.11 per cent. I have to admit that electronic voting had a very different feel from manual voting, aside from the obvious technological differences. In the past, marking your choice of candidates on paper and making sure your ballot was properly inserted into the ballot box seemed to be more meaningful, as if the effort spent on that piece of paper we value as a material manifestation of our democratic rights as students translates to its being more legitimate and worthy of consideration. The automated process was also not that smooth. Earlier during the election day, operations had to be halted for one to two hours in several colleges, including the College of Engineering, one of the largest colleges in the campus, because of glitches in the network. In my college, voting was suspended for over two hours because of problems with the Internet connection. The hours of voting are staggered in various colleges – the earliest starting at 8:30 a.m. and the latest closing time at 7 p.m. for those with night classes – to allow voters to squeeze in voting time between their class schedules. Still, some students reported that they were not able to vote, as their names were nowhere to be found on the list of enrolled students. A former colleague from the campus publication, the Philippine Collegian, who is taking graduate studies in psychology said her name was not on the list; by the time election officers managed to print a paper ballot so she could manually enter her choices, she already had to go to class. After the polling centers were closed, it took only 30 minutes to find out the winners in the student council elections. In the past, votes had to be manually tallied in huge piles of Manila paper, a process that can last up to the wee hours of the morning, especially in bigger colleges with thousands of students. This time around, the results were projected onto the screen at the lobby of the Vinzon’s Hall, the student center of UP, by 7:30 pm because the votes were being counted electronically as they come in. Four years in the making Coming up with the automated election system, however, was not that easy. Six years ago, a group of students who decided they’ve had enough of the cumbersome manual voting system decided to develop the process. Mostly engineering and computer science students, they formed the organization UP Linux Users Group (UnPLUG), a circle of free and open source software advocates. They spent four years developing the election system, including field tests in individual colleges, before launching it university-wide. There are three levels of security involved in the system, says the group’s vice president Jose Paolo Bernardo. First, the system is accessible only within the local network of the UP Diliman campus. Second, each voter has a unique and encrypted password. Lastly, an image called a captcha – which is readable only to human eyes and not to the system – is generated at the end of the process and entered by the voters onto a provided field to confirm their votes. Bernardo says the national government can learn a few lessons from the UP elections for the automated national polls. First off, the automation of the student council elections took four years in the making. UnPLUG took about three years to come up with the system, which had to go through several tests. It was first done in a few departments in the College of Engineering, and later, in a few more colleges. When the system was finally launched on a university-wide level in the 2009 elections, it was conducted centrally so that differences, say, in voting for officers for the college and university councils, were not taken into consideration. Secondly, Bernardo says they automated everything, from filling out electronic ballots to the transmission of results, as opposed to the national elections which still involve paper ballots at the precincts level. The country has a long way to go to automate the balloting process, as a network of national scope will be needed. Certainly, I would not want another national broadband network deal mired in corruption of unprecedented levels. Thirdly, students can verify their votes simply by logging in again and viewing their selections. In case there are electoral protests, their archived ballots can be printed anytime and counted manually. In contrast, the mechanism for the verification of votes is still uncertain in the national elections. One year for Comelec With campus elections on such a limited scope taking about five to six years to become fully automated, one wonders how the Commission on Elections can pull off automated elections on a national scale with barely one year of preparation. For one, over 50 million Filipinos are eligible to vote in the national elections, compared to UP Diliman’s student population of around 22,000. The local area network-based automated elections in the campus are quite manageable, precisely because of a smaller geographic scope. There are no cellular phone signals to worry about, electricity is adequate, and there’s no need to transport bulky voting machines to far-flung areas. More importantly, however, we need to remember that students are only electing officers that will serve for one year and act on issues that are mostly of local relevance. Voters for the national elections are set to elect officials, including the country’s highest leader, that will hold the reins of government in the next three to six years. Nevertheless, participating in the computerized student council elections in UP has been a worthwhile experience for me. Not only did my bets win, but I have also seen with my own eyes that modernization need not undermine the citizen’s right to vote in fair and safe elections. My only hope is that the Comelec can miraculously finish in one year what UP has been doing for the past six years, glitches and all. – YA, GMANews.TV
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