Back to dagdag-bawas?

The Commission on Elections conducted mock elections last week apparently to test whether a hybrid system—or one where manual counting of votes is done at the precinct level but the tallying is fully automated at the municipal, city, provincial and national levels—is feasible.

The poll body's verdict: Forget it.

  

After two hours of manual counting, the poll body said only about 25 ballots were counted.

If, for example, the average number of voters per precinct is around 300, it would take more than 25 hours for the manual counting to be completed. That's enough time for the losing candidates to do everything to influence the outcome of the voting in their favor.

Take your pick: ballot switching, perhaps? Or snatching of the ballot box so there would be failure of elections? Or strafe the precinct with gunfire so that everyone scampers for safety and the count is called off? 

Within those twenty-five hours, so many variations of dagdag-bawas or vote padding and vote shaving can be done by the henchmen of candidates.

Some IT experts and election watchdogs had been egging the poll body to discard the automated election system used in the 2010 and 2013 polls because they said it was riddled with defects and the results could be easily manipulated. Thus, their insistence that a hybrid system be used for next year's presidential polls.

With the mock polls showing very clearly that manual counting will put the country's electoral process back to the Stone Age, will they now shut up and let the Comelec do its job of supervising fully automated elections?  But is it possible that they only want to push another system of automated polls?

And lest we forget, the law says that from 2010 onwards, all elections in the country should be fully automated, in keeping with advances in technology and to ensure that the results would be fast and accurate, thus depriving the dagdag-bawas operators the opportunity to resort to dastardly deeds. –End-

Image by: PhilStar