Namfrel pre-election assessment report

Access the full report at: http://bit.ly/1RYm2kl 

Assessment Summary

"At the time of this report there will be 35 days left to the May 9 presidential and general elections. If the current opinion polls hold, the elections for president and vice president may produce close results."

PEAM was pleased to hear that there is a good level of confidence in the Commission on Elections (COMELEC) among stakeholders. COMELEC has a particular challenge relating to the issuing of voters’ receipts. Voters want a sense of confidence that their votes will be counted as cast. Another issue relates to the timely and transparent reporting of vote totals. Swift and accurate reporting is essential, especially due to past experiences.

Free, fair, inclusive and credible elections depend also on a permissive environment, and we have heard concerns expressed about vote buying and private armed groups impeding access to polling centres.

In the event of close elections, it will be important for all stakeholders to respond in a measured way, and for COMELEC to be prepared to provide a clear narrative surrounding the conduct of the polls and the publication of results.

In addition to issues related to the present elections, this assessment also suggests a national dialogue concerning possible desynchronization of national and local elections, and the possibility of run-off elections to ensure future presidents and vice presidents have a strong mandate.

There is also work to be done to improve the access to their franchise of indigenous people, people with disabilities, and overseas Filipinos."

(Second) The true mandate of the Commission on Elections (COMELEC)

...is to hold competitive elections and create the environment for it.

When do we see the Comelec in court?

The automation of the 2010 polls had many other benefits, which the Philippine electoral management body failed to appreciate. The efficiencies that could be had in using machines, instead of having humans do, to count ballots and consolidate results were many and strategic, and easy and cost-effective to implement. Yet they were not capitalized on. In migrating from the manual to the automated process, the metrics of performance have changed. The inability to tap the efficiencies inherent in the modernized process, that could have been used to improve the administration of the elections, is an inefficiency. For this, we are penalized.

Let me just use the current ballot recount process (discussed in first three parts of this four-part piece) to reveal some of the burden upon the various election actors that the Commission on Elections (Comelec) themselves have caused.

Because the actual accuracy of the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines significantly differed from that which the Comelec had committed, it egged election contestants to call for a recount. The random manual audit done by the Comelec showed that the machine was accurate to only 99.6 percent as against the 99.995 percent promised. Even the number of individual ballots counted, which is a basic test of accuracy, differed. The protester in the recount for mayor of Manila cited unreliability of the PCOS as reason why they had asked that the ballots be reviewed manually.

The impact is that there are close to 100 election protest cases questioning the results before the Comelec and before the House of Representatives Electoral Tribunal.  There are surely others with the trial courts.

Each protester provides a list of 20 percent of the polling stations in her/his jurisdiction, a sample number with which after the recount, to prove that a total recount would be merited. If there are over a thousand polling stations, 200 would be the maximum sample size. The protester bears all the recount cost, including honoraria for the recount committees. The protestee, too, as as result is penalized because s/he has to pay for his/her own representatives in the recount committees, as well as for her/his counsels.

There is no logic behind the 20 percent-of-polling stations recount sample because fewer precincts could have achieved the purpose using statistics. The Comelec could use a random sample of less than five percent of polling stations to establish cause for a jurisdiction-wide recount. Unfortunately, Comelec sees the recount as a fight between contestants even if they themselves had provided the raison d’etre for such fight. This is inefficiency and neglect of responsibility.

Because the automated system failed to make a report on the rate of over votes, no votes (abstentions), under votes and rejected ballots, election contestants and and others are deprived of crucial information. Without this information, the non-winner who has reason to believe that s/he might have won, is better off calling for a recount to play safe. If the Comelec had provided these pieces of information, the contestants would have been able to apply basic tests of statistics to determine if there is indeed a chance to recover votes and change the results. These pieces of information would have been easily captured by the PCOS if Comlec had really appreciated what automation was capable of doing. Who, therefore, pays for this inefficiency? Everyone does.

Because the automated election system used by the Comelec does not have a 100 percent accuracy, then, there should be an automatic recount when the difference between winning and losing is outside of the committed accuracy rate. In this case the Comelec should pay for the cost of the recount. By not having an automatic recount provision, the Comelec is neglectful of the fact that they are responsible to verify results that fall outside of the accuracy rate of the system that they commissioned.

It looks like there are a lot that the Comelec needs to be made accountable for. They do contribute to unnecessarily increasing the cost of getting elected.  So, when do we see them in court?

Earlier posts are: Recount Redux, Circular Reference Error and Rule Change, and Tangibles and Intangibles of Poll Recount.

Circular Reference Error and a Rule Change

Recently the new chairperson of the (Philippine) Commission on Elections (Comelec) said that a manual recounting procedure would be “‘in uniform’ with the system already put in place by other courts” and tribunals handling election protests. (Philippine Daily Inquirer) The Comelec has the details of this new procedure in resolution 9164, passed on March 16, 2011.

The officers of the Philippine Judicial Academy, in my meeting with them in mid-March 2010, said that they were then awaiting Comelec’s guidelines in order to train judges on handing disputes in the automated election system. It is interesting that the Comelec’s most recent guidelines on recounts is the one now being presented as consistent with those that were in place with the courts.

If this form of argument were in an electronic spreadsheet there would be a prompt saying "circular reference error".

While some argue that the presidential (PET), senatorial (SET), and the house of representatives (HRET) electoral tribunals are independent of the Comelec and may promulgate their own rules, it will be untenable to have a situation where one loses in the Comelec count but wins in the tribunals’ own by virtue of difference in the rules.

Therefore, did the Comelec avert a potential contentious situation with the latest revision of the recount rules? Looks like they did indeed. Instead of being the ones to set the rules, it looks though that the tribunals had instead prevailed upon them.

To my knowledge, the first ever recount of protested ballots in the 2010 polls will be conducted next week or 10 months after the winners have been proclaimed. Contestant Lito Atienza sought a recount of ballots of the May 10, 2010 election won by Alfredo Lim in the mayoralty race for the city of Manila. Recounting will start on March 29 for ballots coming from 200 polling stations. I look forward to observing this one and the National Citizens' Movement for Free Elections' (Namfrel) request for an observer status has been sent to the Comelec.

But before then the question becomes, what orientation or training did the Comelec give to the members of the recount committee and candidates’ representatives to ensure proper and uniform appreciation of the ballot and the votes?

Item (h) of Rule 15 of resolution 9164, distinguishes between “voting marks” and “identifying marks.” The former are “markings placed beside the ovals that may appear to show intent of the voter to vote for a party,” while the latter is supposed to be “intentionally placed to identify the ballot or the voter”. Voting marks may be subject to claims, while identifying marks could be subject to objections. Does the Comelec have clear guidelines on these for the recount participants?

The precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines were not programmed to read voting marks outside the ovals unless that mark smudges the timing tracks or the bar code on the ballot. In both cases the machine will reject the ballot because it can neither locate the mark on the oval nor authenticate it.  Accidentally smudging or soiling any other part of the ballot, however, will not cause it to be rejected and the voter will not be disenfranchised.

In the same news article (above), the Comelec chairman said that a manual recount of the ballots “will be a tool to validate the results of the PCOS count last May, if they are correct or not“.

By allowing voting marks to be possibly counted as a vote, using the principle of honoring voter intent, when this could not have been determined with the use of the PCOS machine, the Comelec has changed the rules.  Therefore, expect different results between the count of May 10, 2010 and that of the recount. Whether issues concerning voting marks will be many enough to change the result would be anybody's take though.

(Part 2 of 4. Link to Part 1 is at: http://telibert.blogspot.com/2011/03/recount-redux.html.)

Recount Redux

That there is a strong indication to suspect that errors in the counting process are many enough -- and when corrected would change the results of the election -- is the reason why a losing party would seek a recount. Right?

In the May 2010 local and national elections in the Philippines, machines were used to “read” voter marks on the ballot and aggregate polling station results. Voters were presented with paper ballots that had names of all candidates pre-printed on them and they voted by shading the oval beside the name of each of the candidate they chose. They fed their ballots into the machine that read all the shaded ovals and tallied the votes. The results were known when the polls closed and the machine printed copies of the results.

Precincts (with 200 voters each) were clustered and one machine was allocated for every 1,000 voters. The precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines were manufactured by Smartmatic and the software that “read” the shading on the ovals was reportedly provided by Dominion.

On March 22, 2010, nine weeks before the elections, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) passed resolution 8804 titled, Rules of Procedure on Disputes in an Automated Election System in Connection with the May 10, 2010 Elections. Item l of Section 6, Rule 15 states, “...marks or shades which are less than 50% of the oval shall not be considered as valid votes. Any issue as to whether a certain mark or shade is within the threshold shall be [sic] determined by feeding the ballot on the PCOS machine, and not my human determination”. Counting would be manual unless the recount committees are unable to determine if a shade meets the 50 percent mark or not, then ballot would be fed into the PCOS.

At the end of November, six months after the polls, the Comelec passed resolution 9104 titled, Rules of Procedure for the Recount of Ballots Subject of Election Protest Cases Filed with the Comelec. Amending Section 6, Rule 15 in the previous resolution, it entirely uses the PCOS in the recount. If there is a discrepancy between the original and recounted results, the original ballots images generated in 2010 from the compact flash (CF) card would be compared against the ones just generated at the recount.

However, more than 10 months after the election, on March 16, the Comelec yet again passed another resolution numbered 9164, Reinstating and Reimplementing Comelec Resolution 8804 with Amendments. This reverted the recounting to manual and the PCOS only to be used, if at all, to authenticate the ballots because Comelec could decide on other methods of checking the bar code and the ultra-violet ray code on the ballot. Determining whether an oval the size of a pencil eraser head is shaded 50 percent or more is a now entirely up to humans.

What could explain the corrections made by the Comelec and what might be the impact?

I can think of three and all point to the uncertainty of the accuracy of the machine. Complainants do not want the “suspect” PCOS to do the re-counting (first and second resolutions); change in Comelec chairpersonship; and failure to appreciate new context brought about by automating the vote appreciation process.

Comelec specified in the bid documents that machines should have a certified accuracy of 99.995 percent. This means that the machine may miss a mark for every 20,000 that it has read, or an error rate of 0.005 percent.

Assume 650 voters in a clustered precinct and 73% came out to vote. This yields 475 voters. Assume further an average ballot fill-up rate of 60% (there are between 26 and 32 positions for election on each ballot, but let’s assume 28; and voters only fill up 60% of that, meaning they opted not to vote for some positions). These are 17 marks on every ballot. Multiplied by the number of voters, the number of marks read by the machine in this case is 8,075. So there is a possibility of eight erroneous reads. Whether there will actually be eight or one error or whether there will be any errors at all are all in the realm of probability and statistics.

But the random manual audit commissioned by the Comelec recorded an accuracy of 99.6% or an error rate of 0.4%; or one in every 1,000 marks (Center for People Empowerment and Governance). The National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections’ (Namfrel) also reported accuracy rates of just 99.56 percent and 99.53 percent in the random manual audits they had witnessed.

Another startling discovery is that there was a discrepancy between the number of ballots counted by the machine and the ones counted by the random manual audit committee. I wrote in the Namfrel report that in Precinct Cluster 8 composed of Precincts 32-A, 33-A, 34-A, 35-A and 36-A at the San Perfecto Elementary School (San Juan, metro Manila) the PCOS machine counted 616 ballots although there were only 614 in the box (Namfrel Report 2010). The committee checked and rechecked to ensure that they themselves counted correctly. How could the machine guarantee accuracy in the counting of votes when it could not guarantee accuracy in counting the number of ballots?

A snapshot of the polling station result (known as election return) from the random manual audit of Cluster 8 of San Perfecto Elementary School in San Juan, metro Manila.

The polling station result (known as the election return) prepared at the random manual audit to check the accuracy of the precinct count optical scan machines. This return is from Precinct Cluster 8 of the San Perfecto Elementary School in the city of San Juan in metro Manila. The machine recorded 616 voters but the ballots actually found inside the box was only 614.

Indeed there is reason to suspect the accuracy and reliability of the PCOS. The Comelec is caught between a rock -- reliability of judgment and consistency of human appreciation of degrees of shading of ovals; and a hard place -- the recorded inaccuracies of the PCOS. What to do?

(Part 1 of 4)