Welcome to the new year.
The last one was remarkable, to say the least, for being such a roller-coaster ride. For the Commission on Elections (Comelec), it involved having to commit resources to an electoral exercise that everybody knew was going to be postponed, but whose postponement no one wanted to confirm or definitively deny, and which was eventually postponed anyway, but only after more than 50 million ballots had already been printed.
The youth, on the other hand, were called on to step up, which they did in their millions, only to be told that they had to cool their heels for another eight months, and that in the meantime, they shouldn’t be disappointed because they would get their representation eventually, except that no one can give them any sort of ironclad guarantee for that either.
And now, we’re about four short months away from getting confirmation either way. Although there have been no new murmurings of postponement, the takeaways from 2017 stay with us: There is absolutely nothing standing in the way of multiple, consecutive, postponements of the same electoral exercise, no reasonable argument can be effectively made for an early resolution of the indeterminacy of fate of the polls, and that it can never be “too late” to postpone elections.
Against that backdrop, the Comelec faces the new year with one major imperative: to prepare for the midterm elections next year. The preparations for the 2019 National and Local Elections can be broken down—conceptually, at least—into four major interlocking blocks: preparing the election “infrastructure”; automation preparations; “voter education”; and, to round everything out, inclusivity integration.
By election infrastructure, I refer to those elements, which are essential to the successful conduct of elections—such as cleaning up and finalizing the lists of voters, updating the legal framework for the elections and securing the various physical requirements for free and fair elections, including procurement of election supplies.
The infrastructure preparations will, of course, be influenced extensively by the work done for the second block—automation. This will include, first and foremost, resolving the issue of what sort of automated election system (AES) will be employed. Will we continue using the paper ballots with ballot counting machines, like we did in 2010, 2013 and 2016? Or will we begin using paperless election systems, similar to what was used in Maguindanao during the automated elections in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao in 2008? Or will we attempt a combination of both systems, operating in parallel, again as in 2008? To be perfectly frank, resolving this primordial issue alone will probably take more time than it ideally ought to.
Resolved it must be, however—and preferably sooner rather than later—because only then can the more tedious parts of automation preparation start: procurement, customization, certification—including source code reviews—and deployment.
Equally dependent on the resolution of the question of what AES to use is the third block of preparations: voter education.
Or at least “voter education” is what we’ve come to call the process of familiarizing the electorate with the AES they will be called upon to use—and trust—on election day. This will involve taking the chosen system out on a roadshow, to give the public an opportunity to see it working, to get comfortable with it, and to voice their concerns about it. Under the law, this process is supposed to start around December 2018; personally, I would prefer it if we could get this voter-education program up and running as early as October, giving us approximately seven months to get the voting public up to speed.
The fourth block—inclusivity integration—has actually already started. In 2017 the Comelec launched its initiative to promote gender equality in elections, and much work has already been done in the area of promoting greater accessibility to elections for vulnerable sectors, such as persons with disabilities, indigenous peoples and detention prisoners. These thrusts will have to be continued and expanded in the coming year, in order to ensure that the elections of 2019 are not only the best they can be technologically, but also the free-est and fairest elections in our history.