A year into his term, President Rodrigo Duterte has become easily one of the most polarizing figures in Philippine political history. To a certain extent, his brief tenure as the country’s first president from Mindanao had been foreshadowed by his equally dramatic rise into power a year ago, an upheaval that surprised many political experts.
Even so, the tumultuous year of Duterte’s presidency—rocked by scandal after scandal, each one more outrageous than the last—began with one of the most credible and peaceful elections in recent memory. The 2016 national elections was only the third time the Commission on Elections implemented fully automated polls, successfully fulfilling its mandate of ensuring a fast, accurate, and secure conduct of the elections.
In two short years, Filipinos will once again troop to voting precincts all over the archipelago for the mid-term elections, where 12 Senate seats are up for contest, in addition to local positions. Already, the Comelec had started preparations for May 2019.
That Filipinos overwhelmingly support automated elections is partly due to the long history of manual elections in the Philippines, one that has been marred by tediousness and fraud. Manual elections require voters to write the names of their chosen candidates on the ballot, which they then drop in a box. These are read aloud and recorded on a tally board.
This procedure, aside from being time-consuming, allowed a lot of room for human intervention, which in turn rendered the process vulnerable to fraud. Notorious among the known modus are dagdag-bawas, or vote padding and shaving, ballot snatching, voter disenfranchisement, as well as outright fabrication of election returns and canvassed results. Worse, this fraud extended to all rungs, from barangay elections all the way to the national positions.
So normalized is the perception of rigging in the elections that some take it as part and parcel of Philippine politics. Public outcry continued, however, and finally impelled the Comelec to seek and end to the irregularities by way of an automated election system in 1992 through Operation Modex, or “Modernization and Excellence.”
It was five years later when Republic Act No 8346, which authorized the Comelec to implement an automated election, was passed into law. Less than a decade later in 2007, RA 8436 was amended by RA 9369, which mandated the use of appropriate technology as well as called for transparent, credible, fair, and accurate elections. The subsequent testing of the paper-based system and the direct recording electronic election system eventually paved the way for the successful automation of the 2010 polls, today considered a game-changer in Philippine electoral history. Of the more than 75,000 machines used, less than 500 malfunctioned. Local winners were determined in a few hours, and national winners, in a day. These represent a far cry from the weeks and months it used to take for winners to be declared.
Subsequent automated polls in 2013 and 2016 were similarly successful by and large, with last year’s edition making use of Vote Counting Machines instead of Precinct Count Optical Scan machines. In terms of perception, a survey found that nearly all Filipinos think that the conduct of the elections had been fast (92 percent) and believable (89 percent). The same trend is observed in perceptions of orderliness and lack of vote buying and cheating.
According to the findings of a special study of the Stratbase ADR Institute “Technology, Democracy, and Elections in the Philippines” authored by Dr. Francisco A. Magno and Danica Ella P. Panelo, the general assessment of the 2016 Philippine automated elections was positive and was by far the best managed with nationwide surveys showing strong confidence on the results.
This context is important in view of the crucial link between democracy and the elections. To cite, perhaps it is no coincidence that Duterte’s supporters unfailingly bring up the 16-million Filipinos who voted for him to demonstrate a solid mandate. In many ways this is a testament to the overwhelming faith in that year’s vote. In fact, recent opinion polls reveal that he still enjoys excellent trust ratings of over 80 percent. His predecessor Benigno Aquino enjoyed the same legitimacy despite the usual criticisms.
Contrast this, for instance, to the tenuous tenure of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who had to battle through issues of illegitimacy and destabilization, many of which are rooted in the controversial 2004 elections. Clearly, then, for a democracy like the Philippines’, the normalization of credible polls is an important bulwark. This is the most important lesson of election automation.
So were the billions invested in automated elections worth it? Definitely!