Requiem for the anti-automation movement’s greatest hits

By James Jimenez

It’s all over the news. The Commission on Elections recently signed contracts with suppliers for the automation of the 2025 National and Local Elections. In the context of everything that has happened before this landmark development, I think it’s fairly safe to say that the anti-automation lobby no longer commands as much of the public discourse as it used to. Whatever the reason for that, spare a moment to consider all the ways that movement sought to sow doubt and public dissatisfaction with the way elections have been run since 2010.

THE GREATEST HITS

“Voters would not know how to vote,” they cried, leaving out the fact that the voters would be using a ballot that looked and worked almost exactly like the standardized testing form first introduced by the National College Entrance Exam as far back as 1988. This particular fantasy was so popular that the politicians themselves took up the call and started distributing “voting templates” – ballot sized cardboard sheets with cut-out ovals that would line up exactly where the politician’s name would be on the ballot itself.

“The counting machines could not be trusted to count the ballots” they argued, simply because they could not physically see actual taras being marked out on a blackboard. By the terms of this particular fear, automated counting was referred to with the suitably ominous tag ‘blackbox voting’ which basically meant that counting was being done in secret – in an opaque black box as it were – away from the glare of public scrutiny.

The problem with this analogy was that it derived from an electoral system that used voting machines and not counting machines. There is a difference. A voting machine is one in which a voter enters his votes directly into some terminal, which then presumably adds the voter’s votes to the pool of votes already entered into the same machine by previous voters. With a counting machine, on the other hand, the voter has to fill out a paper ballot, which is then counted by the counting machine. The difference between the two is the existence of a paper ballot.

With a voting machine, the voter’s vote is completely digital, and does not exist as a tangible record anywhere else. Imagine entering a hundred numbers into a calculator, one after the other. How will you be able to check the accuracy of your 36^th entry or your 47^th or your 70^th? Because no written record exists of the numbers you put it, a recount would be practically impossible. But with paper ballots, you essentially have a list of the numbers that you keyed into the calculator, and in case of doubt, you know exactly what numbers went into your machine. Thus, even though both systems rely on machines to do the actual math, a counting machine is intrinsically more trustworthy than paper-less voting machines, because of its use of paper ballots – which the automated election system of the Philippines does.  Calling the Philippines’s system blackbox voting was, therefore, misleading at best.

EXOTIC THEORIES

But ultimately that didn’t matter too much to the anti-automation lobby. Once the results from those machines were electronically canvassed – the process of consolidating the voting results from individual precincts – well, they didn’t want to trust those canvass results either. Instead, they would focus their efforts on proposing ever more exotic theories of how those results could be defrauded.

One particularly sore loser even risked breaking the law by tampering with a counting machine’s memory card to prove that it could be done. That stunt proved that yes, the memory card could be tampered with using brute force, but it also proved that a tampered memory card would not even be recognized by the counting and canvassing systems, much less allowed to alter the official results in any way.

There was no shortage of claims of ‘fixed’ ballots either. Ballots, they said, were being shipped to various precincts, that were pre-marked – the ovals next to certain candidates already shaded in. When it was pointed out that such ballots would simply be rejected by voters themselves, the theory morphed into invisible pre-markings. Like those other theories, this was plain bunk. While vote counting machines did have infrared readers that detected COMELEC’s invisible security marks, these readers simply did not scan those areas of the ballot where the votes would appear.

And when going for the counting machines turned out to be so easily disproven, attention focused on the transmission system. Hidden servers, suspicious-looking results percentages, and man-in-the middle attacks – taken individually, these allegations can be tricky to disprove, requiring technical details that don’t really translate well into the realm of public perception, but in the end, the proof really is in the pudding. Each counting machine outputs a printout of the data – known as the election return – it sends to the municipal canvassing center above it. And which is distributed to very nearly anyone who asks for it. It is therefore, literally just a matter of tallying up the individual election returns t see if they match up with the canvassing reports. This is, in fact, what one of the COMELEC’s accredited citizen’s arms did – throwing massive manpower at the challenge, and the outcome essentially corroborated COMELEC’s official count.

MOVING ON

And now, here we are, slowly rolling into 2025 with a brand-new automated election system in the works.  Is the anti-automation movement truly dead? I doubt it. But we are experiencing something of a strategic pause in the hostilities. Whatever the reason the COMELEC has essentially been granted a clean slate. Let us hope that the title of this piece turns out to be more prophetic than ironic.