By the time this piece gets published, the National Board of Canvassers may or have yet to proclaim either Camarines Sur Rep. Leni Robredo or Sen. Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. as the country’s vice president.
Regardless of who comes out on top and how narrow the winning margin is, the bigger question concerning the reliability of Smartmatic’s vote-counting machines remains to be answered.
Lately, Smartmatic came under fire for changing the hash code without clearance from the Commission on Elections (Comelec) and sparking a backlash from the camp of Sen. Marcos who claimed that it cost him votes that would have helped him win the vice presidency.
Further fueling Marcos’s allegations was the fact that Robredo overtook his lead at past 3 a.m., “when the whole country was sleeping,” so to speak, and managed to maintain that lead near the end of the tabulation of votes.
Robredo may or may not eventually win the vice presidency though her camp claims that she will on the narrow margin of more than 20,000 votes.
Yet her victory will be called to question by Sen. Marcos, whose father ironically had been accused of rigging the last snap presidential elections that eventually led to the first Edsa Revolution.
Which brings us back to the question not only of the reliability but the viability of vote-counting machines as sold to us by the UK-based provider Smartmatic. Are there vote-counting machines out there that can do a better job and are less prone to error and damage?
Again to recall last year, a manual recount of the ballots used in the 2013 elections showed losing candidate Gilbert Wagas being beaten by eventual winner Joel Quiño by a smaller margin.
That incident may or may not be used as point of reference by Cebu City Mayor Michael Rama in his election protest as he insisted that it was him and not Mayor-elect Tomas Osmeña who won a large majority of the votes.
Yet that incident along with that Smartmatic blunder, intentional or not, on the hash code will be used to further fuel the argument of opponents of the automated elections that the country go back to manual mode instead.
But we all know how that went especially in light of the now infamous “Hello Garci” scandal of 2004. Still the Compostela incident showed that the vote-counting machines aren’t 100 percent perfect and are prone to errors and discrepancies in tabulating the votes.
In a closely fought contest like the one in Daanbantayan in which Mayor-elect Vicente Loot won by only seven votes, any discrepancy or error is crucial to changing the outcome.
The Commission on Elections (Comelec) and Congress may want to sit down and decide on choosing a better service provider that would be able to implement fully automated elections.
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