Sample of a ballot used in the poll automation demonstration in ANC forum on Poll Automation, Sept. 21. 2009.

MANILA - Automation will compel election cheats in the national race to go back to basics, where fraud is committed on the ballot itself rather than on election returns, an election operator told abs-cbnNEWS.com/Newsbreak.

Poll officials have been claiming that automation will eliminate the usual dirty tricks employed in cheating since there will be less human intervention in the counting, canvassing and transmission of results,

One cheating scheme that presumably would be harder to implement is the insertion of pre-filled ballots, specifically the ballots that are not used because of a lower-than-expected voter turnout.

But an election operator disagreed. On the contrary, the operator said cheating would be easier to pull off since automation will now do away with ballot appreciation. “One can just insert the pre-filled up ballots inside the machine and nobody can question whether the ballots have been filled up by one person because one only has to do some shading.”

The operator confirmed that one usual cheating tactic employed in the manual system has been the insertion of pre-filled ballots. To pull off this scheme, however, one would need the collusion of the Board of Election Inspectors (BEIs).

The pre-filled ballots are actually genuine since they are part of those allotted for every precinct. Around 10% to 15% of the allotted ballots are pre-filled a day before and surreptitiously inserted by election cheats into the ballot box on election day.

For example, for a precinct with 200 registered voters, there could be between 20 to 30 pre-filled ballots. Multiply this by pre-filled ballots in  several other precincts in a barangay and this could easily affect the outcome in a tightly contested local race. 

The operator said that while insertions of pre-filled ballots are normally done in local races, cheats for national races will now have to resort to the scheme—“provided they could not manipulate the consolidation and transmission of results.”

70-80 % voter turnout

If one is to cheat polls through pre-filled ballots, just how big could it get? The country’s historical voter turnout gives an indication.

Official government data shows that voter turnout in major elections--national and mid-term polls--is normally between 70% to 80%. The figure in the 2004 synchronized polls, however, was an aberration since it posted an 84.1% voter turnout.

In the 2004 presidential race, with an 84.1% turnout, almost 7 million voters did not or failed to vote, out of the 43.5 million registered voters.

However, if the voter turnout of 81.30% in the 1998 presidential race is applied in the 2004 race, only about 35.3 million voters would have actually voted, or more than 8 million who did not vote.

Given that the winning presidential candidate in 2004 won only by a million votes, manipulation of ballots at the precinct level can actually affect the national race, the poll operator said.
 
On the average, the poll operator said only about 10% to 15% of the allotted ballots per precinct are manipulated to avoid raising suspicions. “You cannot manipulate entirely the unused ballots since that would arouse some suspicions. It is rare to have 100% voter turnout.”

In the past, the Comelec printed 10% more ballots in excess of the registered number of voters, but the practice has been scrapped due to  suspicion that the excess ballots were being used for fraud.

For the May 2010 automated polls, the Comelec will print ballots approximate to the number of registered voters. This means there will be no excess ballots. As of September 2009, the number of registered voters was close to 46 million.

ANC forum

During ANC’s forum on automation Monday night, Nacionalista Party (NP) spokesman Adel Tamano raised the issue of ballots being filled up even before election day, a practice rampant in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM).

Election lawyer Sixto Brillantes told abs-cbnnews.com/Newsbreak said pre-filled ballots are most likely the unused ballots because of the less than 100 % voter-turnout. “Since there are no excess ballots being printed out, those pre-filled up ballots are from the allotted ballots in the precincts,” Brillantes said.

Former Surigao del Sur representative Prospero Pichay likewise raised the issue on how the unused ballots would be disposed.
 
Pichay said the number of unused ballots subject to potential manipulation is compounded by a heavily padded voters' list. The padding of the voters' list is a perennial problem of the Comelec.

Offering no concrete solution, Rafanan said the problem of pre-filled ballots and low voter turnout is more a human error than machine.

But in a follow-up interview, Rafanan said he was reminded by Comelec chair Jose Melo that unused ballots are torn or marked void by the BEIs.

Brillantes agreed, saying the unused ballots are disposed of before the counting in the precinct begins.

Collusion with BEIs

Despite automation, Brillantes said cheating using genuine ballots is still possible, but he added that it may occur at the “retail” level, affecting mainly local races.

He said it would require collusion with BEIs who will have custody of the ballots at the precinct level ahead of anyone else.

Brillantes said cheating operators would have to be more specific with their scheme this time since the machines would not be able to read ballots outside of its precinct code. Under automation, clustered precincts have assigned counting machines, and the machines will not read ballots outside of the assigned precincts.

But the election operator stressed that cheating using the unused ballots could still affect the national posts if conducted on a national scale.

Automation now compels election cheats working for national and local candidates to “return to the basics”—by cheating at the precinct level, the operator said.

In manual elections, cheating was concentrated at the municipal, provincial and city canvassing levels through schemes such as dag-dag-bawas (add-subtract).