Doubts raised over automated vote-count in Philippines (News Feature)

By Girlie Linao May 20, 2010, 7:08 GMT

Manila - Euphoria over speedy results in the Philippines' national elections last week has been giving way to mounting doubts over the integrity of the automated vote-counting, amid allegations of digital fraud.

While Congress has yet to proclaim officially the winners in the presidential and vice-presidential races, the results of most local contests were declared within a week of the May 10 elections.

Filipinos also already have a good idea of the likely next president and vice president, based on an unofficial count by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) just hours after the polls closed.

'That was so pleasant: waking up to the results the morning after general elections,' political analyst Alex Magno wrote in his newspaper column three days after the ballot.

'And this made the day after even more pleasant: in less than a day after polls closed, the losing candidates were conceding the elections,' he added.

But the celebrations over the automated system, used for the first time in the Philippines, were short-lived as alleged testimonies of vote-shaving and vote-padding started surfacing, over a week after the elections.

'The mounting reports of automated election fraud from all over the country can no longer be dismissed as minor glitches in an otherwise generally credible election,' House Speaker Prospero Nograles said Wednesday as the lower chamber of Congress opened a public inquiry into the allegations.

'We cannot allow our people to be hoodwinked by hallelujahs to a totally flawed election process,' added Nograles, who lost his mayoralty bid in the southern city of Davao. 'We must give back to every Filipino voter the truth of the vote stolen from him or her.'

Under the new automated system, voters shaded in ovals on printed ballots using a special marker. They then fed the ballots into optical-scanning machines, which counted the votes and transmitted the results electronically to central servers.

One alleged witness - a masked, bespectacled man - claimed in a 30-minute video shown at the House inquiry that he participated in a nationwide operation to shave votes from candidates to favour other contenders.

The man said the alleged operation involved switching ballots, installing memory cards programmed only to count votes for certain candidates into the optical-scanning machines and blocking the transmission of real results.

Manipulated results were then transmitted to central servers using spare optical-scanning machines, he added.

While doubts lingered over the true identity of the witness and his expose, election monitoring groups have also raised questions over the integrity of the new system.

Halalang Marangal, a civil society organization monitoring the elections, noted that Comelec only tested the counting machines once before the May 10 elections and the computers failed accurately to tally the votes due to defective memory cards.

A frantic effort to reconfigure the memory cards allegedly fixed the problem, but no further tests were conducted.

The group added that ballots were not authenticated with the use of ultraviolet lamps on election day and election officers did not digitally sign the transmitted results to protect against manipulated data.

'This is not to say we advocate a full return to the old manual system, but only a prudent scrutiny of the automated process,' it said in a statement. 'Let the niggling questions be answered satisfactorily, before we finally accept the final results.'

The Commission on Elections said it was prepared to face an investigation into the fraud allegations. It added that an ongoing audit of the automated counting has so far showed very little discrepancy.

'It's easy to throw allegations, but they must present proof,' election Commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal said. 'We are ready to answer all allegations point by point.'

Prospero De Vera, a professor at the University of the Philippines' National College of Public Administration and Governance, said an investigation into the process was vital to avoid the same errors in future.

'The intention is to correct flaws in existing laws and processes so that in (the midterm elections in) 2013, this will not happen anymore,' he said. 'Everyone's so happy because of the quick national results, but there are simply too many loose ends.'