MANILA, Philippines—It’s all systems go for elections in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), the first fully automated elections to be held in the Philippines, Commission on Elections Chairman Jose Melo said Friday.

The commission and its partners are all set to hold the landmark election on Aug. 11, in which around 1.5 million ARMM residents will use electronic instead of conventional pen-and-paper voting, Melo said at a news briefing.

“It’s go, go, go,” Melo said 10 days before the opening of 9,763 precincts in the ARMM.

“We hope that the ARMM elections will be clean, orderly and peaceful, thereby contributing to the peace and order in the region,” said the head of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) and retired justice of the Supreme Court.

He noted the electronic voting in the ARMM “will be the precursor to the 2010 [national] elections. If we fail here, we will have difficulty in 2010.”

A fully automated national election is a “dream long cherished by the Comelec,” Melo said.

He said the Comelec would proceed with the ARMM elections despite moves for postponement in Congress because of a request from the Muslim separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front, with which the government is in peace negotiations.

However, if Congress, in the short time that is left, manages to pass a law to reset the elections, the Comelec is also “ready” for that, Melo said.

Last Wednesday, the House suffrage and electoral reforms committee approved the bill postponing the ARMM elections.

Melo said he believed that the bill would die on the House floor, with the Senate refusing to file a similar, counterpart bill and supportinge Comelec decision to push through with the elections on Aug. 11.

Nonbinding, high-tech test

Melo said that even on the outside chance that a law would be passed to postpone the vote, the Comelec would hold an election “to test” the technologies, results of which would be nonbinding.

Starting this weekend, Comelec officials will start “locking the configuration” of the machines that will be sent to all parts of ARMM, he said.

The ARMM elections will use two types of technologies. In Maguindanao province, the Comelec will use Direct Recording Electric touch-screen technology, in which voters will touch their chosen candidate’s picture on a small monitor. The system immediately records the information.

In the provinces of Basilan, Sulu, Tawi-Tawi, Shariff Kabunsuan and Lanao del Sur, voters will use special ballots that will be fed into a system called optical mark reader. The special ballots are now being printed, Melo said.

The two private companies that will provide the automated voting and counting services, Avante International Technology and Smartmatic-Sahi, will test the machines onsite in the next few days, Melo said.

By the middle of next week, employees of Comelec and its partner agencies that are being deployed to help in the elections will start setting up the voting systems and other election paraphernalia, commission officials said.

Special action officers

The Comelec has activated its special action officers to monitor illegal activities in voting places, Election Commissioner Rene Sarmiento said.

It is also in constant coordination with the police and the military, he said.

Unlike in other elections, the police, not the military, will be in charge of election security in the ARMM. The policemen will be barred from entering voting precincts and must stay 50 meters away from the polling center, Sarmiento said.

He said all Comelec employees and their partners were “highly motivated” to make the automated elections a success.

Comelec executive director Jose Tolentino said the public school teachers who would serve on Board of Election Inspectors had been trained. He said the Comelec would pay them P2,000 for two days of work.

In case some teachers fail to report for election duty on Aug. 11, the Department of Education has prepared a list of their substitutes, he said.

Election Commissioner Moslemen Macarambon said he did not believe that Mindanao’s Muslim separatist groups like the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), which wants the elections to be postponed, would attempt to disrupt the voting.

Muslims are “clannish” and many ARMM candidates have relatives in the MILF whom they have prevailed upon to campaign for them, he said.

“As a Muslim, personally,” Macarambon said, he believed “the peace talks are not in any way related to the elections.”

22 foreign observers

Members of the Asian Network for Free Elections (ANFREL) who would observe the ARMM elections met with Melo in Makati City on Friday.

Though threats to their safety in one of the country’s most volatile regions remain as a top concern, the 22 foreign observers were eager to go to the ARMM to watch the “exciting” elections, ANFREL executive director Somsri Hananuntasuk said.

She said some Asian countries, such as Nepal and Thailand, pilot-tested electronic technologies in some cities during their recent elections but the ARMM elections would be unique in that the foreign observers would see and compare two technologies.

“It’s very exciting for us,” she said. “Of course, we would like to study the new technologies. We’ve heard about the DRE [Direct Recording Electric touch-screen technology] in America and in India, but in Southeast Asia, this is new to us.”

ANFREL mission director Ichal Supriadi said, “Observers consider the ARMM election as very crucial for observation due to the fact that the poll has been planned under some uncertainty. It is hoped that the situation and the outcome of the election will benefit both local and national administrations and will bring peace and stability to the region.”

ANFREL members said they hope that the new technologies would lessen electoral fraud, which they said they witnessed in the 2007 Philippine midterm elections.

Although technology does not totally eliminate electoral fraud, it promises less human contact and makes it harder for party operators to manipulate the votes, they noted.

ANFREL officials said they hoped other Asian countries would follow the Philippines’ example and take steps to automate their elections.

They said the ARMM example would give the election observers some ideas on technologies and processes that could be applied to their own countries.

No country in the region that has fully automated elections, they said.

Supriadi said he hoped to bring some knowledge of automation back to his country, Indonesia, which will hold general elections next year.

Human contact reduced

Supriadi said he would be looking at the people’s response to the new electronic processes and the machines’ reliability and accuracy.

He said it was crucial that the machines would reduce human contact with the ballots, to discourage cheating and manipulation of votes.

The ANFREL delegation to ARMM includes observers from Thailand, Nepal, Cambodia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh—countries that have experienced violent and volatile elections in the past few years.

They will be allowed to enter polling centers and observe the activities before, during and after the elections.

They are “battle-tested” observers, having observed violent elections in post-Taliban Afghanistan and war-torn Sri Lanka.

Compared with those places, the ARMM may be less dangerous, Supriadi said, but he added they were not taking any chances.

Scared off

Hananuntasuk said the kidnapping of television journalist Ces Drilon and Mindanao State University professor Octavio Dinampo in Sulu province last June scared some ANFREL members and five declined to join them.

The observers will be deployed in pairs and will partner with Comelec employees and volunteers of the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting.

Despite the dangers, they will not ask for a security detail from the military or the police, Supriadi said. “We try to appear neutral and impartial,” he said.

“This election should be easier … Based on the preliminary briefing, the political interest is less so there is less violence and less fraud,” Supriadi said. With editing by INQUIRER.net