THE Commission on Elections (Comelec) has been urged to consider the use of the Transparent Election System (Tapat) amid the legal and other problems surrounding the use of the automated election system (AES) in the coming 2016 polls.
The use of Tapat is being backed by the Automated Election System Watch (AES Watch) through an on-line petition created over change.org.
Under the technology created by Filipino computer engineers Arnold and Angelo Villasanta, the Tapat system requires voters to shade ballots with the preassigned numbers of their chosen candidates.
Afterwards, the accomplished ballot will be scanned by the optical mark reader.
The machine will then issue a receipt, called voter verified paper audit trail, which will allow voters to double-check if the machine read their votes accurately, before both the receipt and the ballot are dropped into the ballot boxes.
“The Tapat developers, the Villasantas, just built an android program and installed it in the tablet. It’s not rocket science. The Comelec should heed this call,” AES Watch Spokesman Nelson Celis said in a statement.
Tapat’s developers said it will only take three minutes for a voter to fill-up the ballots and the whole system will cost only P1 billion.
“The tablets to be used in Tapat are commercially off-the-shelf gadgets. Not only cheap and easy to use, tablet technology is considered mature and there are local companies producing Filipino-made tablets,” Celis noted.
Last month the AES Watch led the conduct of a mock election at the Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila to showcase the system’s capability, wherein Comelec Chairman Andres D. Bautista and Commissioner Rowena V. Guanzon were among the participants.
While agreeing on the promising features of the Tapat system, Bautista has said that the proximity of the 2016 elections makes it impractical to experiment with a technology that is not yet tried and tested.
The Comelec has kept its two options open in order to comply with the law mandating an automated elections.
The first option is the reuse of the 81,896 Precinct Count Optical Scan machines to be supplemented by the 23,000 Optical Mark Reader (OMR), while the other one is the use of all new OMR units by combining the 23,000 and the 70,977 OMR units to be acquired.