Rockin’ the vote… coming soon, I hope

By Lawrence Casiraya
INQUIRER.net

CEBU, Philippines–At the Cebu ICT exhibit, US company Smartmatic showed off its answer to one important issue most people in this country seem not to care much about or even be aware of — how to automate the country’s elections.

Election computerization is not a new issue, though. It should have happened several elections ago, only it was mired in controversy — a not-so-surprising route for most government IT projects. Now some foreign companies like Smartmatic say it can be done with proven technology.

This machine shown above (which looks like an ordinary IP phone) is used to verify individual voters, assuming there‘s a database, of course. You tap either your left or right thumb onto that small slot at the bottom and out comes a printed confirmation that you are indeed eligible to vote.

Smartmatic says the machine can also be used to build a voters’ registry and, connected to a printer, can print a voter’s ID like this one below. Unfortunately, the system suffered a glitch and so that would have been me on the sample ID instead of Cesar Flores. (Yes he is a real person and is actually a Venezuelan executive from Smartmatic).

Once you get verified, you then go to the polling booth and cast your votes by pressing on a pre-configured touch screen on the right. (The mock demo was patterned after the most recent presidential polls. GMA vs FPJ, remember?)

Then you confirm your votes with the machine on the left that stores the data two ways — on a fixed and removable hard drive. By the way, you cannot proceed voting until an election official authorizes the machine to receive data by pushing a button somewhere.

The system then generates a receipt that essentially becomes your ballot. You drop this in the ballot box and these serve as written records for manual counting purposes.

The solution — (which Smartmatic says has been used in South American countries like Venezuela and also in the US — does make it look simple and more importantly, promises to produce election results a lot faster. Comelec is still counting votes while I’m writing this.

But then again, technology isn’t the problem. It’s the government’s readiness and willingness to adopt it that’s making it a problem.

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