e-voting
Slashdot pointed me to an article that demonstrated how to crack a Diebold self-service voting machine.
A couple of untrained 54-year old women from Black Box Voting bought $12 worth of tools and in four minutes penetrated the memory card seals, removed, replaced the memory card, and sealed it all up again without leaving a trace.
Is it really that easy to crack voting machines? Is that the main reason why the implementation of an electronic election system has been put off so long despite having all the necessary materials ready?
News Flash:
Last 2003, Mega Pacific eSolutions Inc. was awarded with a contract worth PhP1.3 billion (US$25.27 million) by the Comelec. The agreement was for around 2000 Automated Counting Machines to be used in the May 2004 elections. Later on, Comelec paid and Mega Pacific delivered the machines. There was no e-voting during the 2004 elections. Why? At January of 2004, the Supreme Court nullified the contract between Comelec and Mega Pacific because of some legal technicalities.
So for the past two years, the Philippine government has been asking Mega Pacific to return the money. Mega Pacific has yet to comply with such request.
Supreme Court
Why the H didn’t the Supreme Court step in a lot earlier before the PhP 1.3 billion transaction was made? I hope this wasn’t part of an orchestrated plan for a system that wasn’t bound to work at all from the beginning. Think about it, from a technical standpoint, e-voting is easy to implement. However, from a cultural perspective, e-voting will be a pain in the arse to implement in the Philippines.
- Education. The Filipinos aren’t educated yet on how the system works.
- Apathy. The deal was for 40 million Filipino votes. That’s almost half of our local population. How many of them actually go out and vote?
- Accuracy. The machines were proven to be accurate. I think some politicians didn’t like the idea of a voting system that was too accurate. If 40 million votes out of 80 are hard enough, imagine 40 million unique votes…
Sour Loser
Or could this be a case of a sour loser? Did the losing bidders get something out of the deal too by being quiet for a while? Or did they specifically wait for the Comelec and Mega Pacific to get entrenched too deeply first before bringing this up?
Cheated-Cheater
As with most government biddings, there are always two sides of the camp. Those who won and those who got cheated. Did the other bidders really got cheated when it lost to a 2-month old corporation? Was Mega Pacific eSolutions created to address real problems or to cheat us out with virtual solutions? Who was cheated? The bidders? Comelec? Mega Pacific? The politicians? The Supreme Court? None of the above. It was the Filipino People. The people who are paying e-vat so that there’ll be a bigger budget to craft real solutions for the people.
However, enough of this negative investigative journalism. We already have too much of that out there on the net. I’m not looking for cheaters or mistakes. I’m looking for opportunities and strengths to leverage.
With the 2007 local elections coming up, it seems that there’s no hope for an electronic voting system on the horizon. Until then, it seems like quick counts will be done manually. Since the machines are already there, I hope a little common sense wafts into the room and make them realize that the best thing that they could do is go out and use it. Maybe not on 2007, but hopefully soon. The longer we keep them stocked up, the more money that the Philippines loses through storage costs, inflation, opportunity cost and depreciation. Or we could do as Botswana does…
In Botswana, until 1999, voting was done by colored marbles. Polling places had jars of marbles for the candidates. Each candidate’s jar had marbles of a different color. Voters filed through, picked a marble from their candidate’s jar, and dropped it into a box. At the end of the day, the marbles in the box were sorted and counted.