The Commission on Elections’ indefatigable Senior Commissioner Rowena V. Guanzon once again started conversations all over the place when she tweeted: “four suppliers of Mobile App voting program/system offered to conduct a test run for @Comelec. If successful we will ask Congress to pass a law.” The Comelec’s march toward modernity clearly didn’t end when it successfully introduced the automated election system in 2010.
For the roughly three people left in the world who still don’t know what it is, the word “app” is an abbreviation for “application,” which in turn refers to a piece of software generally performing a specific function, or set of functions. If the software is designed to run on a mobile platform, i.e., a smartphone or a tablet, it is referred to, quite imaginatively, as a mobile app.
In the context of elections and election management, mobile apps are nothing new. There are apps that allow a person to register as a voter, as well as to check their registration status; there are apps that act like news aggregators, allowing users quick access to election related news; and some apps that are primarily used for voter education, or even as an aid in choosing who to vote for. The mobile app mentioned by Guanzon, however, goes a couple of steps farther—it is envisioned to be used for actual voting.
That means this still-to-be-demonstrated app is really a new way to implement an idea that the Comelec has been pushing for since 2007—Internet-based voting. Back then, as now, the turn out of overseas voters was underwhelming. The low numbers were attributed to several factors, the top 2 of which were—first, the difficulty and inconvenience of making a trip to the embassy to cast a vote; and second, the fact that overseas Filipino workers (who made up a significant fraction of the overseas voting population) often moved from residence to residence without leaving forwarding addresses, resulting in mailed ballots being sent back undelivered. Internet-based voting was seen as a potential solution to both these problems as it would allow the voter to vote from any computer—even a home computer—with access to the Internet, and it would essentially eliminate the need for a physical mailing address, making individual mobility a nonissue.
The 2020 version envisioned by Guanzon adds the use of mobile phones into the mix and basically supercharges the potential of the idea. The ubiquity of smartphones and the widespread availability of mobile Internet access means that we are now on the cusp of the age of the portable vote where you no longer need to go to a physical polling place, or need a desktop computer to access the voting portal! People with smartphones would be able to literally vote anywhere, and at any time during the voting period. And since Internet-based voting does away with the need for paper ballots, you can most likely pay for the entire system out of the savings alone. All in all, mobile app-based voting is promising to be an ideal solution. But there’s a catch—Internet-based voting—not to mention mobile app-based voting—isn’t authorized by law. Which is why, in her tweet, Guanzon specifically says that the Comelec “will ask Congress to pass a law.”
As an interesting side-note to this story, the feisty commissioner followed up on her tweets by announcing the identities of the “four suppliers” she had mentioned, asking netizens to “research them,” and to e-mail her the results of their digging. This sort of crowd-sourcing of background checks is an interesting strategy, to say the least, and it definitely shows that this savvy senior commissioner has her fingers squarely on the pulse of our young voters.