Fears of automated voting glitches cast doubt on Philippine elections

MANILA — In the days leading up to the Philippine national elections Monday, voters in the capital region could be seen wearing the colors of their chosen party — yellow, orange, green, red — as they commute on busy city streets lined with posters of smiling candidates promising corruption-free leadership.

But the excitement has been overshadowed by fears that the results from the country's first automated national polls could be contested due to technical glitches, resulting in mass protests and election failure.

According to the Philippine Commission on Elections (Comelec), the automated voting system will speed up the election process by calculating results in a matter of hours — a task that used to take weeks of counting by hand. Election automation also is intended to cut down on vote fraud in a country where ballot stuffing is common and close races frequently turn violent.

But less than a week before elections, more than 76,000 faulty memory chips from the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines were recalled by Smartmatic-TIM, the multinational company contracted to produce the voting machines, causing panic that the automated system will not be ready by election day.

The possibility of electricity shortages in certain parts of the country also has raised concerns of blackouts during polling hours. Comelec has not prepared the paperwork or arranged the manpower for a complete manual count should the automated elections fail.

That prompted several candidates, including three of the nine presidential hopefuls, to call for a postponement of the elections. Comelec and the Philippine Supreme Court dismissed the possibility of a delay."Right now I think the atmosphere is general apprehension," said Joy Aceron, Director of the Political Democracy and Reform (PODER) program at the Ateneo School of Government in Metro Manila. "The lack of confidence in the machines, really it's something that could... put to question the results of the elections."

Leading the latest presidential election survey by nearly 20 percentage points is Senator Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III, the son of two of the most beloved national heroes in Philippine history. His deceased parents, Senator Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino and former President Corazon Aquino, led the opposition against dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the 1980s. Aquino has hinted that if he is not victorious it will be due to problems with automated voting.

Similar comments were made by Aquino's two main rivals, Senator Manny Villar and former president Joseph "Erap" Estrada, who have both said they doubt the veracity of the voting machines and may pursue legal action if they are not declared the winners. Villar is a rags-to-riches businessman while Estrada is a former movie star who was ousted from the presidency on corruption charges in 2001.

The possibility of contested election results have raised the question of another People Power Revolution, the 1986 protests that forced Macros to flee the country and brought Aquino's mother, Corazon, to power.

"I am worried about the machines not counting my vote," Gerry Gonzales, a 27-year-old pedicab driver in Metro Manila who plans to vote for Aquino, said through a translator. Gonzales added that he plans to protest if Aquino does not win the election, because "to cheat Noynoy is not right."

But Teddy Dario, the Head of the Makati Volunteers Center for presidential candidate Gibo Teodoro, urged voters to support the results of the automated elections.

"I think that our country will come out as a laughing stock if we [protest] on the streets and change the leader," Dario said. "We're a democratic country, we should respect whoever wins on Monday."

The Philippines has a history of removing unpopular leaders through mass protests, including Marcos in 1986 and Estrada in 2001. Current president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo also was the target of an attempted rebellion after she replaced Estrada, and there are suspicions that she will attempt to hold onto power if the May 10th elections fail.

"If these machines will malfunction, [voters will] have apprehensions that the administration is behind it," said Inocencia Miones, 63, a retired English professor. Miones is organizing a group of election observers to monitor the polls in a dense Manila community of squatter settlements where vote buying has been reported in past elections. Miones' group will be representing a group that endorses Aquino for president.

Two days before the election, the observers, many of them dressed in the yellow color of Aquino's Liberal Party,gathered at a local women's health clinic in Tonsuya to prepare party-list voter information sheets and discuss the new automated voting system.

"There were reports on the television that there were problems with the machines," Lorena Quitlong, a 32-year-old housewife and mother of three said through a translator. The others chimed in with their concerns — that the machines would reject or misread the ballots, that older voters with unsteady hands wouldn't be able to properly shade the ovals for their chosen candidates, that the masses would protest the election results.

Michelle Armayan, 20, a recent university graduate and first-time voter who was watching the party-list preparations at the clinic, was skeptical there would be an accurate count. But that won't deter her from voting. "My vote is very important, even if it is not counted. My vote is my right."

PODER director Aceron said that skepticism of the automated election system stems from decades of election fraud and government corruption.

"The bigger issue here is the lack of trust and confidence in the government institutions," Aceron said. "The machines are not really the problem."

Aceron's sentiment was echoed by Uldarico Martinez, a 61-year-old undecided voter who was selling cotton candy outside of the clinic in Tonsuya and who has lived through nine of the country's fourteen presidencies. "I don't have confidence in manual or automated elections," he said through a translator, and, with a shrug, turned his attention to his next customer.

Jessica Knowles is a U.S. Fulbright scholar based in Manila and an intern at ABS-CBN, a Philippine news broadcaster.