It’s now almost 2 weeks after the Philippine National Elections and I think the question that most Filipinos are currently thinking right now is that “Was the first-ever automated elections successful or not?” I’ve been asking this question myself and had a few thoughts of my own. In some aspects, the first automated elections in the Philippines is successful however, it seems that it’s possible that it’s bound to become a failure.
As I mentioned, I think the elections have been successful in some aspects. The most obvious one is that the actual voting procedure is so much easier and faster for the people (aside from the ridiculously long queues). Just shade then feed it into the PCOS (Precinct Count Optical Scan) machine and then let them put indelible ink on your finger and you’re off. The process of transmitting the votes has improved considerably since local officials have been proclaimed as early as within 24 hours or so after the election.
Generally, the election was peaceful. There were isolated cases of violence in some parts of the country and some did die and got hurt at some point. We even saw in the different news programs, on Philippine local TV channels 2 and 7, some people firing guns while there were so many people around. Now that’s a sight. I thought guns were supposed to be banned? The peace situation could have been better and hopefully on the next elections and campaign periods, there will be no violence.
However, today, it seems that the automated election isn’t actually meeting the expectations of the people. Right now, based on the current tally shown on GMA channel 7’s website, it shows that there are only 90.26% election returns accounted for. What happened to that 9.74%? For me, for an election to be successful, every vote should be accounted for and counted fairly. Right now, we’re hearing accusations of cheating, manipulating, threats, etc. and it does show on the results. Why is it taking too long to count the rest of the votes? What happened to those election returns?
The newly-elected senators have been proclaimed however, mathematically speaking, that 9.74% can make a difference. It’s still composed of a few million votes which are more than enough for the next 2-3 candidates to probably make it in the final 12. The same goes for the presidential and vice-presidential race. Well we really can’t expect an election to be perfect. Mistakes can happen, either intentionally or not, but things might be going haywire in this year’s election and nobody seems to have full control.
I really don’t know what’s going on but I am one with the rest of the Filipino people in hoping for a peaceful and fair conclusion to this year’s National Elections. We’ll just have to wait until all controversies, issues and predicaments have been taken cared of and for all the votes to be counted. If they have to go to a manual count, then I guess that’s the last resort.
Source:
National Election Results Tally – Eleksyon 2010 – GMANews.tv
http://www.gmanews.tv/eleksyon2010/nationalcount#presref
