Being an Automated Elections Observer is Hard Work 185.0

Observing elections is a vocation and profession. Vignettes. IFES and NDI.

Vignette 1. I first met Butch Abad, now of the Liberal Party, when he saw a group of us of the Cebu NAMFREL off to Danao City, then dangerous Ramon Durano country, for the snap elections in 1985. Then, we were all observers with NAMFREL.

The picture above is a mock up of the real ballot showing the Presidential candidates. V Acosta of the KBL is still in the ballot and M Villar, whose family name starts with a V as the tenth candidate, sticks out by itself at right. Judge for yourself if Butch is right in asking for a reprint of the ballot – after Acosta was disqualified and 9 million ballots already printed – to put N Aquino as first name and also tuck in M Villar at the bottom of the list.

If Comelec had agreed to his request, that would have added at least 15 days to the ballot printing schedule. More importantly, the Comelec would have to postpone the elections!

For Updates. Please find new link to all automated elections posts on SYNTHESiST at the top of the sidebar at right and under SYNTHESiST Potpourri. I have also added key links to websites of interest to election observers.

IFES Workshop II. The International Foundation for Electoral Systems (Visit the IFES website through the link on the Sidebar.) conducted its second workshop on the automated elections for civil society organization on Wednesday, March 10.

Mike Yard, an expert in automated elections and election observer in at least 20 countries, conducted the workshop. I quoted him in another SYNTHESiST post from the first workshop in early February.

In that post, I repeated Mike Yard’s purpose of elections and the South Africa story in that post. Below are two new vignettes from Mike.

Vignette 2. On Wednesday’s workshop, the mistrust and climate of cheating is so strong in the Philippines that, he says and I paraphrase; the Philippines is the only country in the world that he has observed were people say they want an election done without human hands. In fact, he further says, we need more eyeballs to observe [but looking at other critical parts of the whole, new automated process].

It seems from the following vignette that we ought to have put more effort at writing a better automated election law rather than try to fix it during an election. Its weaknesses are showing up now.

We are so used to being in a pre-industrial political culture where problems are resolved by areglo, i.e. compromise, rather than argued at the time the law was written that many observers continued the hallowed practice.

Automation, a form of industrialization, has made areglo difficult without compromising the whole mechanized process. This is where Mike’s second vignette is relevant.

This reactive approach to the automated elections, especially in terms of following the basic but absolute rules necessary in mechanization that I have written about in a tongue-in-cheek Post elsewhere in SYNTHESiST, supports my view of our difficulty – as one of the emerging markets – in change management when technological innovation is involved even among the supposedly well-educated groups.

Voter education to implement change, including technology usability, is greatly needed for this automated elections.

Vignette 3. The demand by Namfrel for a more statistically significant Random Manual Audit (RMA) is the kind of issue that ought to have been raised at the time the enabling law, R.A. 9369, for automated elections was written or have it amended earlier.

First, the law mandates full automation though allows for some contingency action.

Second, for Comelec to grant Namfrel’s request is analogous to making the whole election manual.

On these, I make two takes: (a) the consolidation of any manual canvass to the whole count makes the whole election manual as former Namfrel head and Comelec chair Christian Monsod strenuously pointed out in a televised forum, and (b) granting a review of the ballot based on voter intent as Namfrel wants with the expanded RMA and to have the results counted pre-proclamation also risks turning the whole automated election into manual and against the spirit of R.A. 9369 of 2007 (that amended R.A. 8436 of 1998).

On Point (B), the Supreme Court addressed a similar issue in the recount in Florida in the contest between George W Bush and Al Gore. The Court made the difficult compromise because allowing a review of voter’s intent by each ballot would have opened the floodgates for identical protests for all voters to have similar “access” to a review of intent.

With great probability, most differences that can come out in an RMA would revolve around the issue of ‘ambiguous’ marks. It will be almost impossible for people to visually determine a 48% and a 52% shading; this task a machine can do better and objectively.

From my own observations, most positions to consider voter intent taken after a review of a marginal ballot as above would probably be of a partisan color so that the re-count will never end. The machine – because mechanical – is more objective in this sense.

Voter intent is better enabled through voter education on the area of how to shade the ballot. Each voter can express his intent by correctly shading the oval of his choice. At this stage late in the preparations, voter eduction is the more productive effort for civil society organizations.

In these sense, I support the Comelec in allowing the RMA only for future use and not to affect the proclamation. Candidates who feel wronged still have the usual recount option legally prescribed for his specific case.

The Philippine automated elections has paper ballots that allow such recourse without putting the whole national elections in question that can create a constitutional crisis.

Crowd Sourcing. The civil society organizations who attended the workshop comprised the bulk of mainstream organizations. Namfrel was represented by Eric, PPCRV by Raul, NASSA by Edil, CHR by Marilou and Halal by Obet. Other notable attendees were Lente, Task Force 2010, and CCARE.

Mike asked all groups to prepare checklists for issues to be monitored before, during and after elections. The CCARE team representing the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao led by Salic came in full force and presented the most comprehensive checklist that speaks of the preparation already done to prepare for the elections.

All groups presented there checklists and highlighted their knowhow and preparation in their respective areas.

They do well represent the eyeballs that Mike Yard and IFES have worked hard (with other groups like the lawyers of Libertas) that are so necessary and which the National Democratic Institute seem to have not seen in their one week visit to the Philippines.

Pre-Election Assessment. The National Democratic Institute (Visit NDI’s website through link on the sidebar.) conducted a one-week assessment (after another week of preparation visit by T Barry and S de Silva). I had free lunch with them during the preparation phase.

At the Question and Answer, the biggest issue they have in the elections is the apparent failure of the Comelec to communicate with civil society and be transparent even when data and information was available. It may well be

Vignette 4. The full text of their formal statement yesterday, March 13, is available on the link to NDI on the sidebar under the section Links to the Automated Elections Observer or copies of the statement can be downloaded from this link. They sounded more optimistic about the elections during the Q&A in today’s press conference pictured above.

Vignette 5. While the statement was tough, it seems that NDI may not send another observer team before the 2010 elections. Thomas Barry let slip in a conversation at the presscon to me that they are receiving less grants this year. The Philippines is in a less “desperate” situation than other countries in the world as far as elections is concerned and so may not get another visit.

While they formally spoke of the lack of communications to civil society organizations (that may reflect more on the 27 groups they spoke with), they noted that the Philippines has one of the most vibrant civil society to serve as extra eyeballs for this election.

Cebuanos All. At right, Telibert Laoc was the chief consultant for the NDI team during this visit. He has been Executive Director of Namfrel. I first met him when we were Namfrel volunteers in Cebu for the 1985 snap elections and the consultation for the 1986 Constitution.

Vignette 6. Noemi Lardizabal-Dado is chief editor of Blogwatch, a new media e-magazine supported by the Vibal Group of Companies. She first burst into the blog scene as “Filipina Mom Blogger.” I knew her father, Joe, who organized the Toastmaster’s Club at TMX in mid-1980s. Noemi may yet emerge as the Arianna Huffington of America’s Huffington Post. The emergence of new media to challenge the traditional tri-media may be the hidden story of this election.

Noemi should already plan for a transition to active political participation by bloggers. In an insight purportedly from Professor Benedict Anderson, a long-time watcher of the ASEAN political economy, teacher of our young historians and subject of my most favorite post, subscription sales of newspapers in the Philippines come more from the Op-Ed columns and not the front page.

For the automated elections, I will write next about congestion from clustering on Monday’s post, a more detailed discussion after advance Post 183 on March 8.