House urged to look into effective, cost efficient automation of 2013 polls

Deputy Speaker Pablo Garcia. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines — The House of Representatives should look into an effective and cost efficient automated system for the 2013 elections, a lawmaker has urged.

The alternative elections system should “strike a balance between the acknowledged benefits of electronic technology and the time-honored familiarity and proven acceptability of manual elections,” said Deputy Speaker Pablo Garcia of Cebu’s second district.

The measure would apply only to the 2013 polls and “should plug the proven weaknesses of the old system while a reliable, credible and acceptable automated system is yet in the works,” said Garcia.

He said that the May 2010 automated election was “illegal and constitutionally infirm” because the Commission on Elections failed to comply with the provisions of Republic Act 9369.

RA 9369, which was enacted in January 2007, paved the way for automated elections in 2010.

Garcia said that the “hybrid automated election system” introduced by Comelec and SMARTMATIC was different from the mandated automated election system.

While what was being required were voting machines, “the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machine used in 2010 was more of a counting and transmission machine than the voting machine contemplated by RA 9369,” he said.

Garcia said the automation scheme of the elections should cover the entire election process, “including especially the act of voting.”

Furthermore, PCOS machines did not have provisions for a Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) or receipts given to voters after casting votes which would verify that the votes were indeed registered.

“The PCOS was bereft of a verification system that enables the voter to determine if the machine has registered his actual and true choice or choices,” Garcia said.