Automated election fever

I'm quite excited to go to my voting precinct on Monday when we elect our 15th president and other executive, legislative and local officials. It will be our first automated election and I want to get my hands on one of those Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines. It's been a long, long journey for the Philippines to computerize its elections. When I started my IT journalism career in 1990 there was already efforts to junk the manual counting of votes and canvassing of election returns. I still vividly remember one headline we ran: "YORAC SAYS NO TO ARINC SYSTEM". The late Haydee Yorac was then Commissioner of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) and ARINC, if I remember it correctly, joined the bidding to automate the election, but it obviously didn't materialize.

In 2003, a consortium called Mega Pacific also made a bid to computerize the elections. But alleged flaws or irregularities in the bidding process led several groups, including those from the IT sector, to ask the Comelec to nullify the P1.2 billion contract it awarded to Mega Pacific.

Now, we have Smartmatic-Total Information Management (TIM) as the technology provider for the country’s first ever nationwide automated elections that will cost the country about P11 billion. A great digital divide will be crossed on Monday, when all Filipinos who will vote -- young and old, rich and poor -- get to use the same technology to make their voices heard. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this first automated election will be relatively successful.