DICT develops open-source election system

MANILA — The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) developed an open-source automated election system (AES) that AES providers, especially local ones, may adopt and improve on.

During the AES technology fair at the DICT office in Diliman, Quezon City Monday, DICT Undersecretary Eliseo Rio, Jr., said the department was tasked to suggest an alternative AES to the Commission on Elections (Comelec) for the 2022 elections.

“Secretary (Gregorio “Gringo” Honasan II) is the chairman of the Comelec advisory council. So 'yung DICT it’s a department under kay Presidente (So, DICT is a department under the President), we were tasked to come up with a concept. 'Yun lang naman ang gusto namin, na magbigay ng mga konsepto taking into consideration 'yung mga concern ng tao sa automated election system natin (That's what we want, to give a concept that takes into consideration the concerns of the people in our AES),” Rio said.

The DICT presented on Monday the system it only developed in two months, which focused on the improvement of transparency, ballot design, and AES components.

Improved transparency, ballot design

“Why is it our people is not content with having our current AES? Basic concern is lack of transparency. The machine that we rely on to count our votes does not show human beings how it counts the votes. We just put faith in it to count our votes, no questions asked,” Rio said.

In the AES system the DICT developed, the voting process would begin through manual voting wherein the voter would complete the unfilled ballot and drop it in a sealed ballot box instead of a vote counting machine (VCM).

At the close of casting votes, ballots are counted manually through a vote tallying machine (VTM) with its contents shown through a projector in full view of the Board of Election Inspectors (BEI). The BEI can approve or disapprove votes in the ballot through the VTM in real-time and in full transparency.

All counted votes would also be uploaded in real-time to a server, the contents of which will be available for viewing to the public.

The DICT improved the ballot design by making it similar to a ‘lotto’ ticket, which Rio said people are more familiar with.

“Now this is one thing that has been bugging the present AES. (Previous ballot designs) are expensive, printing of about 60 million of these cost around a little over PHP900 million,” Rio said.

He added that the current ballot design does not prevent overvoting, which caused the disenfranchisement of 1.2 million voters in the May 2019 elections.

Instead of requiring voters to count how many they have voted for in a position that requires multiple votes, the DICT ballot employs a multiple-choice system where only one choice can be selected per vacant position.

Voting for senators and other positions requiring multiple votes will have multiple segments in the ballot.

The DICT AES utilized commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components such as document scanners, projectors, and others that are readily available for easier maintenance and lower cost.

“The whole setup is less than PHP50,000. Compare that to PHP67,000 ng isang VCM. Dun sa PHP50,000 kasama na dun 'yung portable genset. Kasama na rin dun 'yung multimedia projector na wala itong VCM. So mas mura, mas marami tayo malalagyan ng ganito na master precinct (Compare that to PHP67,000 for a single VCM. In that PHP50,000 the generator is already included. It also includes a multimedia projector that the VCM does not have. So, it’s cheaper, we’ll be able to have more master precincts with these),” Rio said.

“So maikli ang pila, mabilis ang eleksyon, walang machine na mag-breakdown, dahil hindi na kailangan isubo sa machine (There will be shorter queues, a faster election, and no machines will break down because ballots will not need to be processed by a machine),” he added.

Rio clarified that the AES is not for sale nor will it be adopted by the government since it was only made to encourage other AES providers to adopt or learn from their system.

“This is something that is open. Any company can take this and improve on it and of course, that company has to convince Comelec that it can do better than our present AES. We are not going to sell this; we are just selling the idea that it can be done and Filipinos can do it and we did it in less than two months,” Rio said. (PNA)

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