Philippine Automated Elections – My Experience 207.0

In pictures. I finished with my duty at 7:28 a.m. today
My voting strategy was to come early and be among the first fifty voters in the queue at my voting center or return in the afternoon.

I came in early and was at the gate of the Pasay City West High School near the City Hall area. Using the precinct finder a few weeks ago, I already knew my precinct to be 298-A.

I arrived at the gate at 6:30 a.m. There was a map of precinct and clustered voting centers for the whole school. I found my clustered voting center to be #68. Still, it was not clear to me which building the voting center was located. I had to go around the school to find my voting center.

There was another map in front of my building. I found Voting Center 68 to be in the fourth floor. I am aware that priority was to locate the voting centers in the ground floor to make it easy for vulnerable voters like the disabled and elderly. This was impossible to do at Pasay City West because of the small space though they did have a basketball court in the middle of the grounds that is left unused.

I noticed a few elderly voters with walking sticks slowly being assisted up the stairs. More should be done in future elections to identify the specific disability of the vulnerable sector to find mitigating actions to assist them to vote.

At 6:45 a.m., I found my sequence number on the Precinct list – #10. Knowing the sequence number is important to speed up the BEI process because there are many voters in each book. Every few seconds saved to search and verify each voter will speed up the whole process. The Comelec failed in educating the voters in this aspect.

At 6:48 a.m., I was seated on the Voters’ Assistance Room. Even this early, I was already the twelfth voter in line. By the time, the voting center opened there were already 48 people in the waiting room.

The Chairman of the BEI opened voting at 7:08 am. The picture at right of the voting room was taken just before start of voting. I was the twelfth voter on the line and waited as the first 10 voters in line were invited into the voting room.

At 7:22 a.m., I was invited to vote with the second batch of ten voters. The voting process was efficient. I noticed that in Voting Center 68, I was asked to thumbmark the Election Day Computerized Voters List (EDCVL) just after I was given the ballot. This is how Res 953 advised the sequence to be though Section 36d of Res 8786, the official Comelec resolution specified that thumbmarking should be done after the ballot was accepted by the PCOS. By doing it this way, our voting center avoided the criscross of the accomplished voter coming back to the Chairman’s table after casting his vote and had an efficient one-way, circular flow through the room.

At 7:28 a.m., I finished with my duty of casting the ballot. It just took me six minutes to complete the actual voting process in the room though total voting activity from 6:40 up to the time I left the gate of the school was approximately one hour.

As I left my voting room at around 7:30 a.m., I noted that congestion was starting to occur in other Voting Centers. At the nearby Voting Center #62, there was an overflow crowd outside the full waiting room at the Voters’ Assistance Center.

I hope the voters remain patient despite the long lines and the heat. It would be a big shame if turnout is reduced because people choose to disenfranchise themselves to avoid the long line and the heat.

Last Words. As an experienced manager of operations, I am disappointed with the long queues. Voters, as clients of Comelec, ought not be made to wait even if some lining up seems good optics on TV. I see long queues as a failure of management.

Most of the preparation have been on the technology adoption and very little on polling center management and especially on avoiding congestion from clustering.

Without adopting minute resolution 953, the bottleneck was not the shading but the criscrossing BEI voter verification process recommended by GI resolution 8786 that had thumbmarking after the Polling Center Optical Scan (PCOS) machine.

Inputs have made on this aspect but were not given the importance they deserve. Some have been adopted like the waiting room concept but very little rehearsals made to fine tune the waiting room implementation.

Indications are that the experience of a slow start in the mock election at UNTV with starting process rates of 40 to 60 voters for the first hour is being repeated.

Note: This bit of data was the basis for my voting day strategy that worked.

The BEI’s did not have enough rehearsals like mock elections for such a major change as automation and the process adjustments need to adjust to clustering. This is a failure of change management in applying a major innovation like automated elections in a very constrained environment of clustering.

More could have been to avoid the problem. Unfortunately, very few in Comelec senior officers have this perspective being lawyerly executives. They think that promulgating writs and imposing penalties is enough to execute and operation. They did not do enough of voters’ education as recommended and approved in Res 953.

In a world of automation (and a first world development that we desire), more hard thinking, early preparations and basic disciplines, and finally rehearsals and training are important.

The technology of queue design and management is pretty established. We have experts in telecommunication companies, BPOs, logistics companies, and mall operations for even more complicated multi-step and stochastic processes. Unfortunately, the minds have to be opened first, and a bit of culture of mechanization, ought to be imbibed for queuing as a significant and separate part of the whole automated election process.

I just hope the voters remain patient and stay in line to vote. The congestion from clustering problem cannot be solved on election day by anybody taking charge. It has to be designed into the total voting process. It should have been managed early on. The voters are now condemned to be patient; I hope the disenfranchisement by people going home will not reduce turnout enough to affect the election results.