VoteReportPH: New tools for old problems (PROMETHEUS BOUND)
This article was published in Manila Times, 3 June 2010.
BY RICARDO BAHAGUE JR.
Coming from a history of election fraud and violence, it should have been no surprise that the same old problems were reported during the elections a month ago.
Even the speed at which the Comelec started proclaiming national candidates fell short of the target that the Comelec-Smartmatic automated election system (AES) evangelists promised. Traditional forms of fraud such as vote-buying, harassment and ballot snatching (and pre-shading) remained amid the lack of trust in the AES itself due to Comelec’s own doing: it out-sourced and privatized its constitutional function to a foreign company. Comelec trusted Smartmatic hook, line and sinker as it let security features be removed one by one while playing a deaf ear to calls for them to address vulnerabilities that various groups have raised.
The experience we had with the Comelec-Smartmatic AES should make clear what we have been pointing out since talks of automating the elections were floated. Technology, in this case automation, would not solely solve the plethora of problems of our election. Technology would only be as useful as those who control it allow us, the people, to use it to address our needs. In the AES case, even the Comelec had no control of the technology, making it vulnerable to the various problems it encountered during the electoral exercise. The voting population was expected to trust the AES system as a black box when there were obvious problems with the whole black box itself—compounding the lack of trust with the Comelec itself.
Anticipating problems that did crop up during the election, the Computer Professionals Union together with other groups like KontraDaya, #juanvote, and IT savvy individuals and bloggers put up an electoral monitoring website called VoteReportPH. VoteReportPH became a template for other monitoring sites that CPU helped put up, such as the WeWatch monitoring site for workers.
The VoteReportPH monitoring system integrates SMS, e-mail and web posts to an Ushahidi-based website which then maps the events as they are reported. Similar systems were done in India, Sudan, Mexico and in West Africa. These systems were limited in success either for lack of Internet connectivity or the paucity of reports that came in, averaging around 400 to 500, most of which were unverified.
A review by the Technology for Transparency Network has identified VoteReportPH’s approach as different from those of similar systems mentioned in its six-month pre-election preparations. The team engaged in a voter education campaign on how the voting process in the AES works, its issues and vulnerabilities, and how they can participate in monitoring it through the monitoring system. Due to this wide network, VoteReportPH received more than 3000 various SMS reports. Out of these, we verified, classified and mapped 654 election irregularities at www.votereportph.org.
These well-documented reports can serve as a concrete basis for any future legal and political action to hold the Philippine government’s Commission on Elections (Comelec) and Smartmatic accountable. They, after all, dismissed the possibility of technical problems and fraud in the AES despite being forewarned more than a year before.
VoteReportPH has been a significant success as an effort to empower ordinary citizens with a means of monitoring the electoral exercises in the Philippines. It utilized appropriate technologies to have a broad reach over the entire voting population. We seek to further develop the system to be more crowd sourcing-friendly, without compromising the report credibility through verification. Other initiatives such as #juanvote were successful in their own right as alternative outlets of information where bloggers, twitterers and ordinary web-enabled individuals were able to document the election real-time.
The VoteReportPH experience shows how the use of the Internet and the like can be complementary to grassroots actions. Networking, coordination and information dissemination (and centralization) become easier and faster. Various attempts at SMS reporting here and abroad would be severely limited by the actual numbers on the ground. To an extent, the reporting system can be automated but there has to be some kind of verification that should occur. We had to mobilize teams of volunteers that worked around the clock during election week just to monitor and verify the reports that came in. Even the format of the SMS report would have been a problem if there had been no testing or briefing done beforehand.
VoteReportPH is an example how New Media tools can be used to centralize information from various individuals and groups. It is also a natural growth of our use of SMS and texting from simple networking and mobilization tools to information gathering and citizen media reporting. It is also an example of how IT—information technology—can be used to be of use to the people unlike the IT of Smartmatic that has served their own business interest and the social interests of those who remain in control.
Rick Bahague Jr. is a member of the Samahan ng Nagtataguyod ng Agham at Teknolohiya para sa Sambayanan. He is also the national coordinator of the Computer Professionals Union (CPU).
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