If I heard it correctly from a morning TV news yesterday, there was a reporter who asked a candidate that sounded like this:
“Sir, ano po ang mga gagawin niyong hakbang para siguradong pasok kayo sa 12?”
What? What was the reporter trying to point out? Was the reporter really asking the candidate or was just trying to catch him red-handed for cheating? Duh! As expected, the candidate paused for a while. Perhaps, a good reply for such a question is to pray or maybe offer some sacrifices or rituals to the gods for a miracle to happen. Although I was not able to remember what the candidate’s response was, it was a good thing that another reporter diverted it to another question. Nevertheless, it sounded like a directed fish-bait question.
Election killings? Injuries? This is not different from the Virginia Tech case! Getting people’s lives for the sake of selfish goals and other foolish things. Cheating? It’s already out in the wild in different mutated forms!
From the recent news, there were lots of reported cases on unlocked ballot boxes found outside voting or canvassing stations. In General Santos City, there were items that lack the required watermarks for authentication. Election returns from the past were also mixed up with some ballot boxes. Now, I wonder what the candidates or the people can say about these cases. To be a positive thinker means that I should look over the election like there’s no cheating involved. However, are the canvassing processes not flawed?
Whilst there’s still manual counting involved, working on late nights is usually the situation where the body tends to work slow if not inefficient. The brain might insist to continue working all over the night, but the eye is usually the first to give up. Sometimes, taking coffee is not effective anymore. As always, your mileage may vary. So, what’s the possibility then that the counting/canvassing processes are not flawed at all?
Of course, technology always finds its way in the election process. Not only can automation speed up canvassing processes but it can also make cheating or vote padding-shaving easier and more concealed to the visible mind. All softwares are imperfect for they are man-made products. Take Namfrel’s software problem for instance – instead of having a quick count, a Microsoft Excel software glitch made it sluggish. Well, enough said.
I’d rather recommend people to watch Hacking Democracy, a great documentary that exposes the flaws in voting systems. For the layman, the traditional vote padding-shaving in voting systems means that there’ll be a manual manipulation of the results. In this documentary, the existence of “fixes”, like in the movie’s tagline: “How Do You Vote Them Out If The Fix Is In?“, makes everything too automated – including the backdoor stuff. In one of their experiments, they tried 2 choices and processed some data on a counting machine, and as expected, they got surprised on the results for they have seen the actual manipulation with their own eyes.
Although it might be easy to create online voting systems through rapid application development, its implementation in the real arena is usually the hardest part. Not only issues on software usability are being scrutinized but also in the hacking world of security. Just imagine seeing one of the developers of the voting system hanging out with an election candidate. Would you still trust the system’s result? I highly doubt.
So what other options do we still have? In my opinion, the only thing that we can do is to trust the system, which goes back to the original problem – how can we trust a voting system? What do you think?
