Implementing Automated Elections in a Context of Cheating and Mistrust 181.0

Difficult hurdles for tech-enabled social innovation in the Philippines

Still, the benefits in making wholesale cheating difficult – the main purpose for automating counting and canvassing in this election – and getting the results quicker for the national officials may be well worth the hard work.

For me, the most emblematic story on the management of change from manual to automated elections is a recent banner headline by the Philippine Daily Inquirer (PDI) that 1.7 million ballots for the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao ARMM that have been printed “without security marks”. It reflects on mistrust and a climate of cheating that generates suspicion as reflex on any hint of anything unusual.

With a little more investigation, the true situation would have been found. It turns out that the missing security mark, reported by a credible source no less than the head of the National Printing Office (NPO), was one that the NPO insisted to be added to five already in place. The NPO wants the added mark to protect themselves in case an accounting of ballots need to be made.

The NPO wanted their own set of control numbers to account for all ballots but made the request just a few days before the scheduled printing run. The 1.7 million ARMM ballots had to be printed first because they are longer and have Arabic character translation for Muslim constituents in ARMM. The Commission on Elections (Comelec) decided against adding the NPO marks to avoid a domino effect on the rest of the print runs that could result on delays.

I prefer to give credit to my former billiard co-habitue and city-mate, Jun Engracia, the veteran news editor at the Inquirer, and assume he knew about this explanation.

Being hard-nosed businessmen too, the PDI editors probably could not resist creating a two-part story that will sell more newspapers. The explanation above was printed in the next day’s news coming from Comelec Commissioner Goyo Larrazabal. That probably explains his mysterious update on Facebook late the night before about missing information that needs to be clarified.

The six levels of security marks is an overkill and expensive for the Filipino people. Redundant security features result into torturous, slow and high cost election processes. One ballot alone costs a fortune to produce and yet the cheats continue to prod and poke for weaknesses in the system that needs to be strengthened that in turns motivates more poking and prodding ad nauseam …

For Updates. Please find link to all automated elections posts on top of the sidebar at right and under SYNTHESiST Potpourri.

Comelec Res 8786 is now posted above on the navigation line. It updates the first GI for BEI in Res 8739 issued on December 29, 2009. It was promulgated on March 4 but was just released on Saturday after we published this post.

Please consider as Res 8786 addressed some concerns pointed out here.

Politics as Big Business. Unfortunately, politics for the national elite is big business. If we follow Jun Lozada’s mathematics, then 20% of our GDP or roughly US$20 billion of value added is the pie this elite is fighting to get even scraps of.

Another aside, if one intends to get 10% or US$2 bilion (P90 billion) of the US$20 billion, does it not make sense for business to spend P9 billion to get elected? Wow, that is truly cynical!

And the national elite, this time not following J. Rocamora’s idea of a responsible one, is using a time-honored scheme adapted from Roman times of making elections the ‘bread and circus’ to engage the masses even as they haughtily grapple among themselves for the loot.

I do struggle to stay positively skeptical instead of pessimistically cynical about the whole process! I do believe it is just a small segment of this elite that is abusive; if we can only get the rest to do its role in nation-building.

Untended consequences.

Here’s another story.

People complain that the new Comelec rule that voters who make errors on their ballot do not get replacement ones will disenfranchise them. And yet the rule was made to avoid cheating. Ballots, in this automated election, are printed specific to each precinct and only a few, three is my recollection, are printed as extra to make sure that a ballot cannot be used in another precinct.

The unavailability of extra ballots has the unintended effect of making replacement impossible and disenfranchisement possible for the error-prone voter. I do not think we can have it both ways.

So the mistrust and suspicion requires a solution but, in unintended ways, also creates a potential problem. As long as this climate of mistrust persists, what results is an endless cat-and-mouse game between the cheats and the nice guys.

Just 70 Days to Election Day. It is very late in the day with just about 70 days left until election day. I think we should start to come together and work with the hand that we are dealt with today.

In November, I have been involved in in-depth simulation studies to avoid congestion from the other problem of clustering (from automation) in this elections. My proposals, in a formal consulting project, have been submitted but not codified into the General Instructions (Click here for full text of GI or Navigation link above.) even as the time to implement has became almost too short for the training required.

Apparently, as of yesterday, the Comelec has decided to let the teachers adjust on polling day rather than for them as election oversees to let the GI properly designate the process.

I think this is a reckless decision that could endanger the elections and the BEI members much less the Comelec’s own field people, the Election Officers. Without the legal framework of a General Instructions that can cover the ideal conduct of polling center operations on election day, this decision puts teachers at risk from legal action or even physical danger on election day.

Support the Comelec as Institution. As I have stated elsewhere in this blog on the presidential candidates and on the mock elections, I do believe that the present team of Comelec leaders, in general, are an admirable and hardworking bunch. I single out those I know or have heard in person only.

Chairman Jose Melo is right in pushing for radical change in terms of a national automation of the elections. An incremental approach would have died the death of a thousand cuts with the nitpicking. I hope his November pilgrimage and the daily masses then will give him the spiritual strength through election day, just 70 days away. I do support him wholeheartedly in this decision.

Commissioner Goyo Larrazabal, the youngest and least senior, is admirable in his coolness and hard work. He is open-minded and innovative but may belong to the minority in the legal-executive – viz legal-scholarly – and bureaucratic organization.

Director Rafanan who I met at a recent forum and Director Elnas and with the officers I have met in the course of the congestion management studies last year were uniformly competent and hardworking within the institutional confines of the Comelec, as organization.

We must support these individual leaders and thus support the Comelec as institution.

As a bureaucratic institution with a legal-executive character, the Comelec itself has internal forces that are resistant to such big changes as automation and clustering. These two challenges demand that we help Comelec adjust and manage the change.

Despite some allegedly bad eggs mixed with the good and its colorful history, I believe we must critically work to strengthen the Comelec, and not to weaken it, as an institution. That is actually the clever challenge and will require all of our people’s ingenuity.

Prognosis and Change Management with Automated Elections. I believe the automated system, will provide protection enough for elections to the office of the President and the first eleven senators.

At the local level, it can create a literal battleground. By protecting, successfully I evaluate, against wholesale cheating it forces the cheats back to the traditional guns, goons and gold to defend precincts were the cheat is strong and disable those where he sees himself weak.

This time, the objective will not be to gain votes but, with difficulty in gaming the automated election system, it will be to deny votes to the opposition while protecting ones ‘owned’ precincts. This describes the potentially deadly battle scenario.

I think the present automated election system will deny the cheats the dagdag part of the dagdag-bawas scheme and allow bawas only with the traditional guns, goons and gold before the PCOS machine. I think this is a potentially deadly scenario if no mode of prevention or avoidance is found and set up..

In this changed environment, the traditional watchdogs seems to have become irrelevant as the technology moved the elections to a different plane.

The PPCRV, the accredited watchdog, is so close to the Comelec that it has become its defender.

NAMFREL seems to have trouble redefining their mission without national accreditation and as the speed of results from the new automated elections makes the quick count, its mainstay product, seem stodgy.

Local Watchdogs Needed. History shows that the locus of cheating moves with each election.

My educated guess (which is a good as yours), is as follows.

With automated elections moving the locus of cheating before the machine and the battleground shifting to local contests, locals must organize their own watchdogs to foil the cheats in the elections before the polling precincts.

While I like Gibo Teodoro as candidate, I believe the administrations grand strategy going forward rests on their presumed control over the mayors. In turn, the first tool of the Mayors is their control over the appointment of the members of the Board of Election Inspectors (BEI).

The BEIs are critical in this election because three of their members are needed to have access to the inside of the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines.

The local watchdogs must work in the next 70 days to make this appointments a transparent and fair process designed to protect the will of the people rather than of the incumbent mayors and those they support.

Even now, the mayors are beefing up the organizations of traffic aides and general services. This can be used to burnish their image before elections but can also be the praetorian guards for more nefarious purposes on election day. The present Sanggunian or city councils must work to make sure they are not used for such nefarious ends.

So the key is not re-fighting past battles as our national watchdogs seem to be doing but anticipating new ones based on new critical control points especially with the radical innovation of automated elections (in this sense, with quick results, OQC does seem inconsequential.)

Enriching the Conversation. The stated goal of SYNTHESiST has always been to enrich the conversation among its target audience in the domain of innovation and change management in emerging markets.

In SYNTHESiST’s case, innovation includes social changes. So my first post was on automated elections and technology and the resulting usability issues that can create disenfranchisement.

The eruption of response to this post on the automated election and the subsequent one on the candidates debates has forced me to rethink (I have a survey above for your thoughts) and give more coverage to this election as a process of change in, what W. Brian Arthur calls, purposive systems so relevant in emerging markets.

I hope this clarifies my agenda and the perspective I take in these posts. Obviously, the public platform I support is one that includes support for innovation and entrepreneurship for progress in the country.