30 Days to the 2010 Automated Elections

by | Apr 10, 2010 | Election 2010, Opinion, Tech Talk

In a matter of 30 days from today, the Philippines will finally implement an automated counting system for the national and local elections. May 10, 2010 will be a day when our country will finally show the world that we are done with the error-prone and easy to manipulate manual counting of ballots.

Automated counting removes several opportunities to manipulate the election results at the precinct level but it also makes some worry that cheating can be automated, and that a scenario causing a failure of elections like continuous power outage would occur forcing us to go into a constitutional dilemma of having no replacement to officials who will end their terms this year.

While it is easy to imagine scenarios of doom, these are really not that easy to do. In order for the automated counting to fail, any, or the combination of the following scenarios would have to be created:

Total Power Failure throughout the country.

Total power outage that lasts several days or weeks, causing total failure of all communication systems and draining all the battery power that comes with the counting machines. This power outage will have to start well before election day in order to ensure a failure of elections as well as a failure of everything else that requires electricity.

Diesel and gasoline supply cut-off several days before the power outage starts to ensure all backup power systems will run out of fuel.

If this total power failure happens, the elections probably won’t matter anymore.

All telecoms systems are jammed.

Someone shells out a significant amount money to buy enough jamming machines to jam all counting machines. These are expensive and they all have to work 100% until COMELEC gives up and cannot transmit the data. Unfortunately, this is very difficult to do. Even if someone manages to get enough jamming machines to significantly affect the data transmission, all COMELEC has to do is move the counting machines to another location where the jamming signal is too weak to affect it and the data transmission will proceed. Also, even if the machine cannot transmit the data electronically, COMELEC can get the data from the machines on a USB drive and manually upload the data to the central database.

To stop data transmission, the jammers will have to take down all forms of connections to the Internet which is unlikely to happen because the Internet itself, a by-product of the cold war, is designed to be resilient to a nuclear attack by using multiple routes. If a certain route is damaged, the data can still go to its destination through other routes.

Someone with the proper access rights to the data will manipulate the numbers.

This is probably the best way a candidate can cheat but for this to happen, the database administrators and software developers must be persons with questionable integrity. Systems developed for critical applications like the elections have multiple safeguards against data integrity issues. There are audit trails built in into the system so any forced changes can be traced. Unless the administrators and developers are willing to take the risk of being caught, this form of cheating would be hard to do.

Random manual count will not match with automated data count.

Any manual count will likely not match with the machine counted votes. This is because the machine may not accept partially marked votes but a human looking at the ballot might accept it. It would be better if the verification count is done on a another counting machine. The results between the counting machine at the precint and the one used for random checking should match closely.

The final election results can be delayed by political parties by complaining of inaccuracies with the manual verification count. However, people should realize that at the national level, any counting errors due to the normal operation of the machines would be more or less shared equally across all candidates which is the normal behavior of large numbers. A candidate would be embarrassing himself if he complains of cheating due to a few counting errors of some machines. A small amount of error is a natural occurence. A candidate would be wise to ensure he leads by several points in the surveys to ensure naturally occuring error cannot turn the tide against him.

Filipinos and the international community do nothing to stop cheating.

All Filipinos are somehow mesmerized by the turn of events that they cannot or will not do anything to help the COMELEC continue with the elections. And for some reason, the international community will leave us on our own and refuse to provide any form of help. This scenario is highly unlikely though because people would always try to defend to survive and would not simply allow events to happen that are disadvantageous to the public.

Filipinos should give the automated elections a chance to succeed and be vigilant against attempts to compromise the sanctity of their votes. A successful May 2010 elections would give the Philippines huge boost in our performance as a country thus giving the nation more opportunities for the community.

Can Automated Elections Eliminate Cheating?

by | Feb 12, 2010 | Election 2010, Features, Opinion, Tech Talk

The May 2010 elections is the first time that counting of ballots will be automated by the COMELEC. The system is now practical with the availability of cellular service throughout most of the country. It has many advantages over the manual process but many are concerned if it will really eliminate cheating.

The Automated Elections main advantage is that it eliminates many steps taken in the past where where manipulation can happen resulting to “dagdag-bawas”.

By automating the counting, the system eliminates the tedious and very error-prone manual counting process. The public school teachers should really be happy that they don’t have to deal with it after everyone has voted because at the end of the voting period, the counting is also done because the votes are recorded as soon as the machine accepts the ballot from the voter. All voters should feed their ballots to the machine directly and not through someone else, to ensure that your ballot will not be replaced.

By automating the submission of the results to a central location, the system eliminates another error-prone and easy to manipulate procedure. In the past, the ballot count is submitted by the precincts to the municipal or city hall and then aggregated. Then the provincial results are aggregated up to the national level. It takes quite some time before the ballot count is eventually consolidated on the national level, and this gives the manipulators a lot of time to do their magic tricks. Now, the individual counting machines can submit their results to the national level on a near real-time basis thus preventing any count manipulation or errors in between the precinct and the aggregation center.

The automated system also includes audit trails which allow the authorized persons to trace any suspicious changes on the system and identify the culprit. In the manual procedure, there is limited audit trail capability, if any.

Electronic jamming systems would be impractical to setup on a scale that can significantly affect the results and may be futile because the system uses cellular service which has its own interference mitigation capability. To be effective at jamming the transmission, you would need to have a jamming system per precinct that is always on all the time. Anytime you turn it off and the automated counting machine can have a chance to send its data and it only takes a few seconds to send all the data in the machine’s memory. The best it could do is probably delay the transmission but not totally prevent it.

The technology that will be used in the May 2010 elections would certainly make it very difficult to manipulate results unless you are able to access the system directly with the proper user privileges. But even that would not be straightforward because the data storage technology used in systems like this store data in multiple copies and have multiple backups taken at regular periods stored in multiple locations. And COMELEC for sure would be wise enough to have a few of these locations undisclosed just in case the known locations are compromised.

Cheating would be very difficult to orchestrate with the automated counting system implemented. But there are still many ways to manipulate votes like vote-buying and coercion. So each Filipino should value his vote and consider it a sacred right guaranteed by the constitution of the Philippines in order to prevent or minimize this kind of manipulation. — J. Auza