Electoral reform before printing of receipts–Comelec

NOT NOW, but later after we have had electoral reform, the Commission on Elections Chair Andres Bautista said, with regard to the activation of the voter verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) or receipt feature of the vote counting machines (VCMs).

Bautista said the Comelec was open to enabling the VVPAT feature but “in the future” when changes shall have been made to the electoral system to give voters more time to cast their ballots.

“I think we should have receipts, hopefully at some point in the future, but we have to change the current election system,” Bautista said in a press conference on Friday.

He suggested that instead of holding the elections on only one day, it should be held over several days to allow for the efficient and systematic implementation of the VVPAT feature.

The feature has the vote-counting machine print out a receipt showing the candidates one voted for, to allow the voter to double-check his picks.

“We should change this concept of having synchronized elections for both national and local posts. We should rethink as to why we have elections only for one day. Why can’t we have elections over several days?” Bautista said.

“If we had more time to vote, I think we would have time to print the receipts. We need electoral reform before we can enable the receipt-printing feature,” he said.

Two petitions have been filed asking the Supreme Court to order the Comelec to enable the receipt-printing feature of the VCMs on the May 9 elections. The petitioners were senatorial candidates Richard Gordon and Greco Belgica.

Earlier, the Comelec announced it would disable the VVPAT feature of the VCMs, saying that printing receipts had more disadvantages than advantages.

It cited a time and motion study it conducted showing that printing receipts so voters could verify their votes would significantly delay the voting process by seven hours and open opportunities for vote-buying.

Based on the study, printing a receipt and reading it through takes a minimum of 43 seconds per voter, for a total of 7.1 hours for 600 voters in one precinct.

In his petition, Gordon said the Comelec could not use its “speculative yet baseless” fear of vote-buying with the use of the VVPAT as an excuse to ignore the law.

He said there was a greater risk of cheating on a mass scale if the VVPAT were not implemented “because digital cheating would be difficult to detect by those uninitiated in the world of information technology, than cheating by isolated cases of vote buying.” With a report from Jerome Aning