By LUZ RIMBAN
FILIPINOS will be greeting tomorrow with much trepidation given the reported glitches of the automated election system, but Smartmatic-TIM president Cesar Flores said Filipinos should get real and expect an imperfect system with its fair share of faults.
“There are many unforeseeable things that could happen. I want people to see that these things will happen,” said Flores in an interview with VERA Files trustees and writers recently.
Flores said public school teachers, most of whom are unlikely to be computer-savvy or completely unfamiliar with computer, will be overseeing the country’s first ever automated voting in the more than 76,000 clustered precincts, acting as Boards of Election Inspectors.
“BEIs will man the machines, they might plug the cord in the wrong place or put the battery where the power goes, or put the paper backward,” he said.
Smartmatic has been on the defensive recently given the delays in the delivery of PCOS machines and, more recently, the replacement of compact flash (CF) cards that contain the software needed for the machine to read votes and count them properly.
Earlier, the company also came under fire for glitches in the voting in Hong Kong, where many overseas Filipinos workers (OFWs) came out to vote.
Flores, however, said the problems Hong Kong had to do with the BEIs storing the PCOS machines and ballots in air-conditioned rooms at the end of the first day. When the machines were retrieved, they were hit with condensation, with caused them to malfunction.
He said the problem will not happen tomorrow because the voting will be a one-day thing, unlike Hong Kong and Singapore where the voting lasted six days.
But Flores also raised the possibility that if problems are encountered tomorrow, it may not be like Hong Kong where, he said, they “consumed spare machines like candy.”
In Hong Kong, OFWs cast their votes only in one building where all 20 precincts were located. When two machines broke down due to condensation, they could send for a replacement machine easily because these were kept in the same building.
Here in the Philippines, Smartmatic-TIM has made provisions for only 2,000 replacement machines, or about 8 percent of the total number of precincts. But these replacements will not necessarily be within easy reach. They could be located as far as two hours away, given the wide dispersal of machines in precincts in a given province.
But BEIs are not supposed to send immediately for replacement machines. Their first move, should the machines malfunction, is to contact a call center set up to help them troubleshoot. If the call center can’t resolve the problem, the next recourse would be a higher IT level.
But the BEIs and Smartmatic won’t have time to waste troubleshooting.
“That’s the tricky thing. We only have 11 hours and we don’t want to keep people waiting,” Flores said. “After 20 to 25 minutes, we stop resolving and bring a replacement. We don’t want to spend too much time troubleshooting. It’s a matter of operational continuity on election day.”
At the same time, Flores also did not discount the possibility of sabotage. He said Smartmatic has experienced elections in other countries where people poured water or hit the machine with a hammer in an effort to stop the process.
VERA Files’ contributor Andrea Dela Cruz was in Hong Kong on the first day Filipinos cast their votes using the automated system last month. She shares her photos: