Getting to know the country’s Automated Election System

The May 13, 2013 polls is the second nationwide automated election in the country.

The Automated Election System (AES) is mandated by Republic Act 8436 of 1997 that was fully implemented only in 2010.

The Philippine AES that relies on the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) is not 100 percent automated as the paper ballot has not been eliminated.

The voter still has to manually fill out the ballot by shading the oval (bilog-na-hugis-itlog) beside the name of a candidate or a party-list group.

After shading the oval, the voter inserts the ballot, which is electronically watermarked, into the PCOS machine, much like sending a document through a fax machine or inserting paper money in a vending machine.

The machine then reads the ballot and records the votes of candidates based on its reading of the shaded oval. The PCOS has an internal memory that stores election results and audit logs.

A removable memory card, a compact flash card, is used to back up the PCOS’s application, election results and audit logs.

Each PCOS has a security key and authenticating PIN code.

At the opening of the vote on Monday, the Board of Election Inspectors turns on the PCOS machine, inserts the security key and logs in the PIN code for authentication. After the authentication PIN is logged, the LCD screen would reflect that the Ballots Cast is zero.

By tapping the ‘Initialize Vote Counter’, the machine prints the initialization report. This report should read zero in all entries – which is to mean that the PCOS has no data yet on number of votes per candidate and party-list group.

Then the voting starts. The ‘Ballot Cast’ at the bottom of the LCD screen gives a running count of the number of votes cast.

In the AES, the voting precinct is not the same as the polling precinct in the manual election system. The voting precinct in the AES are actually clustered precincts. A clustered precinct may include up to five precincts with a maximum number of registered voters of 1,000. A clustered precinct is assigned one PCOS machine.

Voting starts at 7 a.m and ends at 7 p.m. However those within 30 meters of the polling center can vote after the last call is given by the BEI at 7 p.m.

At the end of voting, the BEI would start the digital counting process.

It then prepares for the printing of eight copies of Election Return (ER). After printing eight copies of ER, the transmission of the ER follows.

The machine displays, “Ready to Transmit” and asks the BEI to plug the transmission cable. It then transmits the ER to the Comelec hub.

After transmission, the PCOS will print 22 copies of the ER for national positions and 22 copies for local positions.

After printing the ER, the PCOS will print the Statistics Report and Audit logs.

Then the PCOS machine is shut down. /BenCyrus G. Ellorin