EARLIER this week, the United States held midterm elections that, as of this writing, seemed on track to hand Republicans an overwhelming majority in Congress. What that means for Filipinos is something that will be discussed more thoroughly by others in the coming days. For now, however, what I find most interesting and relevant is how modern technologies have been impacting voting in the US, in both good and not-so-good ways.
First, the good.
On the morning of election day, thousands of students got a text message reminding them to vote and telling them where they were supposed to do just that. The message didn’t come from any political party or candidate, but from a nonpartisan digital service that sends personalized reminders to its registered users. It’s a great idea that was implemented for free and that, obviously, has great potential in boosting voter turnouts. Here at home, where election day doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of slipping past unnoticed, this kind of service might be useful, not so much for the reminder, but for that last crucial bit of motivation to actually get engaged in the political process.
Social networking isn’t getting left out of the picture, either. On election day, Facebook placed a banner on top of the feeds of American users, reminding them to go vote and urging them to share it with their friends, making the act of voting a truly communal experience. It isn’t far-fetched to assume that the same functionality made available in the Philippines would be embraced wholeheartedly by Filipinos.
And now, the not-so-good.
Throughout the US, it seems that the most prevalent election problem had to do with people not being able to access their registration records, or find their names on the voter rolls. In Colorado, for example, the system that verified the eligibility of voters requesting ballots crashed repeatedly. This forced voters to fill out provisional ballots. The same thing happened in Georgia, Texas and Flori-da. These crashes—along with other causes, such as misdelivered lists of voters, undelivered ballots and tardy poll workers—resulted in the extension of voting hours. Sound familiar?
Worse—we Filipinos might consider this downright catastrophic—voting machines and systems were showing up buggy. In California, for instance, election websites were so glitchy that voters had to be redirected to other polling places.
It was a different story in Virginia, where more than 30 voting machines—employing the direct-recording electronic (DRE) technology that the Commission on Elections (Comelec) will be rolling out in a pilot test area in 2016—seemed, at first, to play favorites.
As seen on a video that has already gone viral on the Web, the affected voting machines record a vote for the Democratic candidate, even though the voter clearly and repeatedly selected the Republican contender. In North Carolina the voting machines swung the other way, converting votes for Democrats into votes for Republicans. Fortunately it wasn’t all bleak. In many cases, the switching of the votes was determined to have been caused by “calibration errors,” which were promptly corrected through reprogramming.
Not having seen any of those technical reports, but not being a total stranger to poorly made touch-screen games either, I can guess that a “calibration error” probably means that the active portion of the touchscreen didn’t accurately correspond to the information it displayed.
In a sense, that would make the problem analogous to the troubles we had with “misaligned ovals” in the automation of elections in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao in 1998. Back then, because the ovals were misaligned during ballot printing, the counting machines wrongly attributed votes for one candidate to another. In 2010 we almost saw a repeat of that problem when the entire back page of the ballot was redesigned, and the new layout wasn’t reflected in the counting program of the precinct count optical scan (PCOS). Fortunately, that issue was caught ahead of election day, and after a gargantuan effort to replace the PCOS compact flash cards, the elections were able to proceed on time.
Without a doubt, these cases are red flags for the Comelec to be doubly wary of when it rolls out its DRE pilot test in 2016.
****
James Jimenez is the spokesman of the Commission on Elections.