Press Release
February 16, 2009

Choose the best poll automation system, Gordon warns Comelec

Independent Senator Richard J. Gordon today warned the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to choose the best poll automation system that would ensure that wholesale cheating, which often marred the country's electoral exercises, would no longer be easily carried out in the May 2010 presidential elections.

Gordon, author of the amended Automated Elections System (AES) Law, issued the warning in the wake of proposals from various sectors to consider using the Open Elections Sytem (OES) instead of the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) technology that the Advisory Council recommended.

"Too much is at stake in the May 2010 presidential elections, hence the Comelec should choose a system that would finally get rid of wholesale cheating that usually mars elections in our country," he said.

"Using an automation system that is invulnerable to manipulation would erase public suspicion that the Filipino people's sacrosanct votes would be stolen from them. Dapat yung mawawala na yung pagtingin na dito sa Pilipinas dalawa lang ang klase ng kandidato - yung nanalo at yung nadaya," he added.

The Comelec is reportedly considering using the PCOS technology, an improved Optical Mark Reader (OMR) system that was used along with the Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) technology in the August 2008 automated elections in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM).

PCOS is a technology wherein optical paper ballots, hand-marked by the voters, are inserted for counting into optical ballot scanners placed in every polling precinct.

But several sectors, including the Partido Demokratiko Sosyalista ng Pilipinas of National Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales, several members of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) and former Comelec Chairman Christian Monsod, have asked the Comelec to consider using an OES while Congress is deliberating on the proposed P11.3 billion supplemental budget for the automation of the 2010 elections.

They claimed that the OMR and DRE technologies are both expensive in terms of procurement and storage, and they also do not exactly guarantee fraud-free election results because the electorate cannot manually recheck or validate the results generated by the two systems.

They added that an OES is a more credible method that can be adopted by the Comelec for the scheduled national and local elections in 2010.

In an OES, voters cast their votes manually as they have been doing in past elections. After the close of voting, the ballots are read and tallied as traditionally done with an Election Return (ER) filled out by the Board of Election Inspectors (BEI). A copy of the ER is brought to an encoding center within the school and uploaded to a national central database.

Gordon pointed out that the use of an effective poll automation system would modernize democracy, put an end to the divisiveness in the country and finally bring the long-sought-for closure.

"If the Comelec will ensure that the automated system to be used will stop manipulating election results, we would finally see candidates who were truly elected by the people emerge as victors. It would mean that our country has indeed achieved true democracy," he said.

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