On Election Automation 2

NSA Gonzales refutes Comelec on poll automation.

NATIONAL Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales yesterday refuted the claim of the Commission on Elections that the open election system, which a former chair of the poll body is proposing, is against Republic Act 9369, the law on election automation.

Gonzales clarified that OES is not a return to the manual election system as it combines manual voting and precinct counting with automated consolidation and transmission of votes from the polling centers to the national level.“There is no provision in the law prohibiting the Comelec from adopting this combined election system,” Gonzales said.

Gonzales and at least 38 bishops have endorsed the OES whose main proponent is a group of computer and election experts led by former Comelec chair Christian Monsod.“The OES is not a step backward in poll automation. It is certainly a step forward; perhaps behind the expectation of some people but to the extent that is fit with the readiness of our electorate most of whom have not touched a computer. The system the Comelec has chosen is simply ill-matched to our electorate,” Gonzales stressed.

The Malacanang official also contradicted the assertion of Comelec chair Jose Melo that OES is a formula for “automated dagdag-bawas.”“It is precisely dagdag-bawas or wholesale fraud that we want to eliminate or reduce in pushing for OES,” Gonzales said.

Monsod's group points out that OMR is the one vulnerable to automated wholesale fraud because it involves software programs with key to code known only to the vendor and the Comelec and these software programs can be manipulated by a few computer specialists, Gonzales explained.

The national security adviser said the OES will address wholesale fraud by automating the stages of our election process where dagdag-bawas occurs. “Dagdag-bawas occurs at the canvassing for presidential, vice-presidential and senatorial results.”Gonzales added that automating these stages will speed up very significantly the election process as it would cut the time for canvassing from more than forty days to only 4-5 days.

Gonzales maintained that OES is the election system that is most transparent, most credible and most appropriate for Filipinos, reminding that most voters would trust a system more where they can actually see the counting of ballots.He said the experience in pilot-testing OMR in the last Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) elections showed the disadvantages of the system favored by the election body.

“I can’t understand why we would spend P14B on a system that is not transparent and not fraud-free when there is a better option that would cost us much less at P4B,” Gonzales said.