85% voter turnout seen

The final kinks are still being ironed out, but in spite of the glitches and fears of doom and gloom, the country’s first automated presidential elections are off and running on Monday with a massive voter turnout expected.

Upward of 85 percent of the 50.7 million registered voters are likely to show up under the blistering summer sun, officials of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) predicted on the eve of the historic vote.

“Go to the precincts early,” said Comelec Chair Jose Melo at a news conference Sunday. “Go to the polling precincts prepared. Don’t be intimidated; don’t sell your votes. We should keep these elections as clean as possible.”

Barely 24 hours before the balloting, thousands of workers on board military and private aircraft and some on foot continued to deploy the remaining precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines still undelivered and dispatch replacements for defective memory cards discovered last week.

The mad rush to fix the eleventh-hour glitches could leave only 2 percent of the 76,300 precincts—in Northern Samar, Abra and Nueva Vizcaya—unable to vote on time, officials said.

The Comelec said the delay in some 1,500 precincts could be the lack of testing of the compact flash (CF) cards for the voting machines, and the malfunctioning of the “ibutton” security key used in starting up the voting machine.

“We’ll be hitting by [Monday] 98 percent preparedness or readiness,” Commissioner Rene Sarmiento said. He said this would be the worst-case scenario.

Earlier, the Comelec had said that 5 percent of precincts might hold special elections following the discovery that the CF cards had failed to read test ballots correctly. The problem led to the recall and replacement of the 76,300 CF cards in the PCOS machines.

In areas where the cards are delayed, the voters will still be allowed to vote, but the ballots will be gathered and later fed into the machines when the cards arrive, Melo said.

Comelec Executive Director Jose Tolentino said some 85 percent of the CF cards had been tested as of Sunday afternoon.

Latest hiccup

The ibutton issue was the latest hiccup in the system, but Cesar Flores, Asia Pacific president of Smartmatic, the Comelec’s technology partner, said this had been anticipated.

“Basically, this falls into what I always told you about machine failure or other components like printers, screens, buttons,” Flores said.

The issue was already being addressed, he said. Replacement ibuttons were flown to the problematic precincts Sunday afternoon.

“We have a reason to smile. Our big problem which caused this big worry are the CF cards. Now, all the voting machines, all the ballots, all the ballot boxes are in place. They are in the voting places,” Melo said.

About 50.7 million registered voters nationwide are expected to cast their votes using computerized balloting. Instead of writing their choices on a blank ballot, they will make their choice by shading the oval next to the candidate’s name.

The ballot will be fed into the PCOS machines, which will automatically compute the
Tallies at the end of the voting day. The machines will also transmit the results to the canvassing centers.

Results in 36 hours

Flores said 60 to 70 percent of the election results were expected to be available later Monday night, with the rest arriving in 36 hours.

“By then we will know the probable winners, especially if the margin is big,” Melo said.

Because human intervention is taken out of the canvassing process, the window of opportunity for election cheats has lessened, officials said.

Explaining why he expected a good turnout, Melo said: “The interest here is heightened because it’s the presidential elections and people are curious about the machines. They would like to see how the machines will work.”

Sarmiento said that in previous elections, turnout was 70 to 80 percent. “Considering the two factors mentioned, it could hit even 85 percent,” he said.

Just do it

The last-minute problems had sparked calls for the polls’ postponement and fueled fears of vote-rigging and violence that have long sullied Philippine elections.

“The best way to disprove all the critics who say that this cannot be done is just to do it,” Commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal said.

“Some machines won’t work but they can be replaced and some voters may not go out to vote,” Larrazabal said, adding that the majority of Filipinos will cast their vote and demonstrate that “they have a stake in this democracy.”

“Too many people want the elections to succeed. Too many people want change,” he told The Associated Press.

Violence threatened to derail voting in some areas. More than 2,500 people have been arrested for violating a ban on firearms in public areas and police reported dozens of election-related killings.

Communist New People’s Army rebels also have threatened to attack government troops tasked with delivering the counting machines.

Larrazabal said the difficulty of tampering with the automated elections may have prompted some people to resort to violence and intimidation to bolster their electoral chances.