First Automated Elections
I’m not really fond of talking about politics and such but I believe the first automated Philippine election is worth mentioning.
So May 10, I went early to the voting precincts as I usually do during election day. To my dismay, the queue was a long one. I estimated about a hundred people were in line on my voting precinct room. I estimated if one person takes at least two minutes, signing, selecting their candidates, reviewing, casting their votes, confirming to having voted. Well, for a hundred people ahead of me means two-hundred minutes which is about almost two hours of getting in line and waiting for my turn. So I decided to come back in the late afternoon. After all, the closing of precinct was announced to be until 7PM.
4PM I came back to vote, and indeed I was number 14 waiting in line. The poll watchers and election inspectors gave priorities to senior citizens. Since I’m not senior citizen, I waited in line. After about 10 minutes, I was selecting my candidates. Took me about a minute to mark my selections as I already have a list of whom I will be voting. Casting the votes was easy enough. Just slide the long thick paper that looks like the continuous computer paper that has guide holes on its sides as though I was inserting it on a dot impact printer. The machine took the paper, validated and displayed “Congratulations, you have successfully voted” or something to that effect.
I admit it was easy, fast and efficient. I know the long queue will be solved in the next elections as some procedural bugs needs to be ironed out. The counting of results is also super fast. Previous elections took a few weeks to finally announce who the winners are. With the new automated voting, after a couple of days about 80% of the total votes were officially counted and you will know who are likely to be the winners.
Though as usual on some isolated areas in the Philippines especially what we call the hot zones, election violence still prevail. I hope the new government officials will finally have solution to these unwarranted violence.