Voting woes: PCOS failures, long lines, doubtful counts

New technology was supposed to speed up the May 10 elections. But technical glitches and breakdowns, along with the general unfamiliarity with the new system, actually slowed down the voting in many areas of the country. Where the voting machines worked properly, they were able to service from fifty to fifty-five voters per hour. A GMANews.TV staffer, for instance, finished voting at 12 noon; he was the 264th voter. At this rate, and with the voting period extended to 7 p.m., each cluster would be able to process six hundred to six hundred-sixty voters. If the voters who are queued up at the close of the voting are all allowed to cast their votes, the rate will just be enough to accommodate the typical turnout of 70% of voters, or seven hundred for a precinct cluster of one thousand registered voters. One of the most common problems reported through news reporters, GMANews.TV's YouScoop and the AMA Election Action Center was voting machines that malfunctioned. They froze, overheated, shut down, jammed, rejected ballots, or otherwise failed. Voting machine breakdowns were reported in Caloocan, Manila, Quezon City, San Francisco del Monte, Novaliches, Fairview, Pasig, Pateros, Kalinga, Ilocos Sur, Pangasinan, Bulacan, Batangas, Cavite, Tacloban, Southern Leyte, Cebu City, and Basilan. And when the machines failed, election inspectors were flustered, the processing of ballots slowed down, the lines got longer, and people’s tempers got shorter. Some people waited up to several hours and still had not cast their votes. Others got tired and just gave up. “Nag-uwian na nang hindi nakakaboto [They’ve gone home without voting]," said one AMA Election Action Center report. Senior citizens were apparently promised a fast lane, but in some precincts, they had to line up with the rest. “Twenty-three heads per hour lang ang nakakaboto [only 23 heads per hour are able to vote]", said another report. Voting machine failures did not spare the presidentiables. A GMA News TV report showed a voting machine conking out on one of the nine candidates for president – survey front-runner Benigno Aquino III, who had to queue for more than four hours and leave his polling precinct in Tarlac without his ballot being counted by the machine. One out of nine is an 11% failure rate, which seems to be typical. Smartmatic confirms that at least 400 voting machines malfunctioned. Complaints about disenfranchisement were often heard. Late afternoon reports from PPCRV give turnout figures of 50% or lower, far below the 65-75% turnouts that have characterized previous elections. Two other commonly reported problems were vote buying and voters who could not find their names on the voters’ lists. The cheats are alive and well, doing what they know well. Vote-buying incidents were initially reported in Malabon, Nueva Ecija, Bulacan, Laguna, Sorsogon, Camiguin, and Zamboanga del Norte. Amounts offered ranged from twenty pesos to one thousand., but also often in kind. From Pangasinan, Youscoop received reports of bagoong and patis being part of the voter bribery. Failure of election was recommended in eleven municipalities in Visayas and Mindanao, including the Lanao del Sur municipalities of Tubaran, Masiu, Lumba-Unayan and Lumba-Bayabao, where election inspectors did not show up. In the past, declaring a failure of election was often a way for some local officials to position themselves to sell votes to the highest bidders, where votes in delayed special elections may decide the outcome of tight, unresolved contests. The surge of voters trying to find their precinct using the online Comelec precinct finder proved too much for the Comelec server. In the early morning of election day, the Comelec website slowed to a crawl and finally went down. It managed to recover and was up again in the afternoon. Isolated election violence, brownouts, and mismatched machines and ballots were also reported. The drawing of precincts for the "random manual audit" started promptly at the PICC at 12 noon. The precincts were announced to the media as they were drawn, which raises some questions about the process. If cheats know in advance the precinct that will be audited, it seems logical that they will immediately instruct their field operators to stay away from these precincts and shift their activities elsewhere, defeating the purpose of the audit. Earlier the previous week, the final ten-ballot test had been suspended on the orders of Comelec, when early reports showed gross machine errors in counting votes for local candidates. The problem was traced to a misconfigured memory card in every voting machine. Smartmatic rushed to buy replacement memory cards, reconfigure them, and then deliver them to the waiting voting machines. A second round of final testing should have occurred nationwide on Saturday and Sunday. Curiously, few reports of the tests came in, or whether they were done at all. Hopefully, all voting machines passed the ten-ballot test with no error and it was deemed not worth reporting anymore. But if election inspectors did not do the second round of tests for lack of time, then it is possible that the vote stream going to the canvassing and consolidation servers will be corrupted with inaccurate counts coming from untested voting machines. This cloud of uncertainty, which came out of the miscounts that occurred several days before election day, seems to reflect the current state of the automated elections in the country. As the counting begins, candidates will get their first look at the numbers the machines will report. We will know soon enough, if the losers will trust the machine counts enough to concede defeat, or if they will instead question the accuracy of machines which already miscounted their votes in earlier tests. - HS, GMANews.TV