IT will be election time again in less than ten months and the Commission on Elections still cannot give its full assurance that there will be a smooth, credible, orderly, and systematic kind of election, especially in the marking of one’s ballot.
There’s even a big circumspect in the method of ensuring that electronic transmission of election results from 80,000 precincts nationwide in next year's polls can be done efficiently, easily and without the trouble of being tampered, rigged or corrupted by clever computer hackers.
This is our fear, that the nationwide network coverage might gone wrong because of the absence of contingency plans in case unforeseen events or when few dramatis personae might come into play, given the premise that there is no more time to pilot-test the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines to be provided by Smartmatic and TIM.
In an automated election, the transmission stage is crucial; therefore this should be looked into by the Comelec more than their other priorities at the moment, especially in the provinces when the May 10 poll closes at sun down and the result are due to be transmitted from clustered precincts to the canvassing and consolidation centers in the municipalities towards the poll body’s national center.
We’ve heard that Comelec has already tapped all existing technology platforms to deliver the election results promptly come Election Day. We just hope and pray that the Comelec will be able to see in advance the glitches and troubles before these happen and that whatever solutions they make now will do well to our electoral system and not taint our electoral process again.
Ninety percent of the Filipino electorate is for poll automation, that’s right, and they look back at the old manual counting of votes as time-consuming and bothersome.
Reverting to manual elections would then be unacceptable too, since the law on poll automation had been enacted. But either way, it still remains whichever will work best for the Comelec.
There’s even a big circumspect in the method of ensuring that electronic transmission of election results from 80,000 precincts nationwide in next year's polls can be done efficiently, easily and without the trouble of being tampered, rigged or corrupted by clever computer hackers.
This is our fear, that the nationwide network coverage might gone wrong because of the absence of contingency plans in case unforeseen events or when few dramatis personae might come into play, given the premise that there is no more time to pilot-test the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines to be provided by Smartmatic and TIM.
In an automated election, the transmission stage is crucial; therefore this should be looked into by the Comelec more than their other priorities at the moment, especially in the provinces when the May 10 poll closes at sun down and the result are due to be transmitted from clustered precincts to the canvassing and consolidation centers in the municipalities towards the poll body’s national center.
We’ve heard that Comelec has already tapped all existing technology platforms to deliver the election results promptly come Election Day. We just hope and pray that the Comelec will be able to see in advance the glitches and troubles before these happen and that whatever solutions they make now will do well to our electoral system and not taint our electoral process again.
Ninety percent of the Filipino electorate is for poll automation, that’s right, and they look back at the old manual counting of votes as time-consuming and bothersome.
Reverting to manual elections would then be unacceptable too, since the law on poll automation had been enacted. But either way, it still remains whichever will work best for the Comelec.