There will be 20,632,642 Sangguniang Kabataan voters trooping to the polls next month. I estimate around 5 million of them will be first-time voters, including those aged 15 to 17 years old. For most—if not all—of them, this will be the first time they will see a ballot that is intended to be counted manually. To say that it will be a novel experience for them, however, is to barely scratch the surface.
It will certainly be a new experience, yes. But from the point of view of having to ensure that their votes are faithfully recorded, it will be a challenging one, as well. Having been exposed—on the news if nowhere else—to the ballots used in the automated elections, first-time voters will be approaching #BSKE2018 with preconceptions that probably won’t be 100-percent accurate. For one thing, unless these first-time voters have actually been paying attention to the news, the ballots they will receive won’t even resemble what they might be expecting.
The most obvious difference between the automated elections ballot and the manual elections ballot will be the size. The former is very long; it has to be, because of the need to accommodate the names of all the participating party-list groups. With Barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan Elections (BSKE) 2018 only electing 16 positions, the ballot will be decidedly much shorter.
Also immediately apparent is that the automated elections ballot will have the printed names of all the candidates, arranged by position. The names will have corresponding ovals next to them, which voters will have to fill-in, in order to indicate their vote. The manual elections ballot, on the other hand, will only feature the position titles and blank spaces for the voter to write the names on.
Less apparent to most voters and casual observers will be the downstream effect of these two different kinds of voting procedure. In an automated election, ballots are counted automatically by the vote-counting machines. All the voter has to do is to feed the accomplished ballot into the vote-counting machine, and the automated process of scanning the ballot and recording the votes kicks in.
In contrast, the manual elections ballot will be placed inside the traditional ballot box. At the end of voting, the ballots will be taken out and the votes written on the ballots will be read out loud, one at a time, while one of the election workers tallies down the votes as they are called out. Because the counting and recording processes are all accomplished by election workers, they can very quickly become the targets of the candidates’ ire. This makes manual counting far more interesting—if by interesting you mean stressful, long-drawn-out and, in very extreme cases, potentially harmful to election workers.
Apart from their respective content, automated election and manual election ballots can also be told apart by looking at the distinguishing features of each. The automated elections ballot will feature a row of black rectangles arranged all around the edges. These are called timing marks and are needed for vote counting. It will also feature a long barcode running along the bottom edge.
The manual election ballots do not contain either of these features. However, unlike in automated elections, ballot “neatness” (for lack of a better term) is important in manual elections like BSKE 2018. In an automated election, the ballot will really only be rejected if the voter tampers with the timing marks or the bar code. Writing on either of these two features renders the entire ballot unreadable by the vote counting machines. In a manual election, however, practically any writing or mark, on any part of the ballot, may result in the ballot being declared “marked” and, therefore, considered stray. With the penchant of some people to doodle—adding smiley faces or little hearts to everything —this strict rule might end up being a major source of self-inflicted disenfranchisement.
So, a word to the wise: just write down the names of the candidates you’re voting for; refrain from drawing—or “personalizing”—on your ballot in any way; and don’t tamper with the printed elements—text, illustrations (like the seal) or any of the printed lines—on the ballots.