When the automation of elections was first conceived of, and the needed legislation passed, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) was fully onboard with the idea. It was the consensus in the election management community that human intervention was the overarching weakness of the entire manual electoral process: from the wildly varying legibility of handwritten ballots, to the lack of any discernible standard in interpreting ballots during manual counting; from the error-prone vote recording technique of using stick marks, to the ease with which handwritten election returns could be fraudulently manufactured, the manual electoral process was so full of holes, everyone agreed that a drastic change had to happen.
And it did. With the automation of the national and local elections in 2010, human intervention was reduced to a minimum. The problem of illegible ballots was solved by having the ballots contain the pre-printed names of the candidates; the inconsistency and uncertainty in ballot appreciation was replaced with machine accuracy and reliability; and there was no longer any point in manufacturing fake election returns because the results were immediately publicly known.
Equally important, automation took a great deal of pressure off of the public school teachers who serve on electoral boards. With manual elections, teachers had to decide how to interpret the voters’ intent for every single ballot they counted. This meant that in many cases, teachers actually had to guess at who the voter wanted to vote for. Teachers, in other words, were in the position to grant or deny votes to candidates. This made them primary targets for intimidation, corruption and deadly retribution.
With automation, however, this human cost no longer had to be paid. Since teachers didn’t have the authority to decide who got the vote, they ceased becoming targets. On top of that, teachers have also been relieved of the burden of having to prepare election returns—a massively exhausting undertaking pre-2010.
Today, a return to that same pre-2010 manual electoral process is once again at the forefront of public discussion. And yes, that is where this notion of “reverting back to manual” should be: directly under the glare of critical, public, and even academic examination, rather than as a mere talking point for press conferences. Sometimes, even really good ideas have to be systematically relitigated, if only to minimize the possibility of truly momentous decisions being made on the strength of bad suppositions, malicious misrepresentations and fear-mongering.
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In the meantime, however, that a reasoned and reasonable discussion on whether automation should be abandoned isn’t happening yet, let me veer tangentially off into one of my sort-of-advocacies.
In response to a tweet asking him to write about Filipino myths, acclaimed author Neil Gaiman tweeted: “I really LOVE the myths and monsters of the Philippines. But you also have many terrific writers there who can do a better job of telling those stories than I can.”
I agree on both counts: Yes, we do have awesome myths and monsters in our folklore; and yes, we do have many terrific writers. Sadly, only very rarely do the twain meet and produce a novel. There are some really noteworthy comics out there —although, to be honest, many of those tend to resemble western comics or manga so much that they almost feel like nothing more than an exercise in literary brown-face. Maybe it’s time for local authors to spread their wings more determinedly into the realms of myths and monsters, eh? And hopefully, with adult audiences squarely in mind, as well.