Philippine Automated Election 2010

Elections in the Philippines for the past several years were chaotic, bloody and controversial. This year, the COMELEC (Commission on Elections) officials tried to make a change, a change from using the traditional and month-long process to using an automated machine or what they called the PCOS machine.

Goodbye to the ballot boxes and hello to the PCOS machine.This metamorphosis is an achievement, not only on the part of the COMELEC officials but also to the Filipinos who accepted the challenge.

But, this achievement does not mean that Filipinos will celebrate. Automated election stirred a debate among experts and eventually caused a FEAR- a fear that election will be unsuccessful.

Unsuccessful election results from prying the signal, print ballots will be rejected by the machine, and since the new method requires an extra care in shading the oval, it’s time-consuming.

Nonetheless, not all people in the Philippines owned a television especially those in the remote area. Voter’s education was done through advertisements. How are these people being aware of the process? Sadly, there are just only few people who made an effort to educate those kinds of people which added a burden to the success of the automated election.

But, regardless to all the impossibilities, I would rather choose to stay optimistic. I hope all Filipinos will do the same thing. This success of the first automated election does not lie on luck but it lies on how Filipinos embraced the new system.

Five days more to go before the Philippine 2010 elections but are we ready for it?  The commission on elections somewhat denied the facts that they are not ready for it?  Why?  Its because they still denied that everything is okay even though the Filipinos have already knew that the PCOS machines gave wrong results when thay have tested it.  It is somewhat only choosing the same candidate even though they have tested to choose different candidates during the testing of the PCOS machines.