The Makabayan bloc has filed House Bill 8644 or the Act Providing for Transparent Alternative Manual-Automation Election System for Philippine Elections and For Other Purposes.
Lawmakers Carlos Isagani Zarate, Ferdinand Gaite, Eufemia Cullamat, France Castro, Arlene Brosas, and Sarah Elago said the challenges encountered during automated polls.
“The problem in purely automated elections is the lack of transparency and accountability in the entire process, and, in the end, the credibility of the elections because of the absence of a verifiable process that would assure the voters that their votes were properly counted and canvassed,” they said.
The solons said the lack of transparency makes it hard to probe alleged rampant electoral fraud like hacking, tampering with source code, manipulating votes, and the absence of scan and ultraviolet security.
“The proposed bill aims to provide a solution to the problem: It will retain the speed of automation in the canvassing process where large scale fraud and delay normally takes place, but will institute a manual voting process in the precinct level to verify and validate the results of the automated canvassing process,” the Makabayan bloc said.
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Makabayan bloc pushes for manual-automation election system
Under the proposal, the Philippine elections would not be held under a purely automated system controlled by a technological company. They added that the measure would also help the Commission on Elections to save budget.
“Since the Transparent Alternative Manual-Automated Election System (TAMA election system) being proposed under this Act only requires computers with basic capacity to consolidate and transmit election results, the estimated expense is only about 20 to 30% of the cost than if Comelec were to spend billions to hire Smartmatic or any other tech company,” they said.
“There is no need for the untransparent and complicated technology of Smartmatic since any attempt at hacking or manipulating the results may now be countered and validated through the actual voting results in the precincts and polling places,” the Makabayan bloc added.
The bill combines manual voting at the precinct level and automated canvassing at the municipality, city, provincial and national level.