Want Better Automated Elections?

Let's Try Voter-Centered Design

By Ruben Canlas Jr. (rcanlas@alumni.cmu.edu)
Published in GMANews.tv Blogs
May 21, 2010

Much of the pain we encountered during the past elections -- the long queues, voter
confusion, claims of fraud -- could have been avoided had we taken some care to design
the new voting process with the voters in mind. We focused so much on the technology
that we forgot the real users of the system, namely, Filipinos, majority of whom, like me,
had no practice with drawing small solid ovals using unwieldy marker pens. I'd like to
expound on this proposition, so we could turn our electoral suffering into lessons for
improving the next automated elections.

Let's call this voter-centered design. Let's define its first principle as "any system we
create must prioritize the needs of the users over those of technology." Sounds trivial, but
it has deep implications. For example, with users on top of mind, the priority of questions
will change from "How can we design the ballot to avoid confusing the PCOS
machines?" to "How can we design the ballot to avoid confusing the voters?"

Ballot design. As it happened, we forgot about the users when we designed the ballot. In
a previous essay, I pointed out that the ballot was designed to make life easier for
machines and not for us mere mortals. The narrow, tightly spaced typeface and ALL
CAPS made the names difficult to read. The boxes had to be spaced regularly to satisfy
machine requirements, but in doing this, it cramped up the space for the list of Presidents,
Vice Presidents and Senators while it gave lots of space to the Party Lists.

One online reader suggested that shading a rectangular box would have been easier for
us. It only requires us to draw horizontal lines, an easier alternative to drawing ovals. I
add that rectangles would also have spared us from using "bilog na hugis itlog", a term
that is incorrect on many levels of meaning, but this is nitpicking.
Lack of clear processes in the voting stations. A non-voting, independent observer
during election day did not have to try their hand at voting to see there was a problem.
The long queues of discombobulated people outside the precincts were hints enough that
COMELEC forgot to anticipate and manage critical processes.

COMELEC and Smartmatic's excuse for these pains is that we went through the biggest
switch ever to automated elections in the world, so these problems should be tolerated.
We must disagree with this spin and not let them off the hook that easily. Had they put the
voter at the center of the whole process, they should have asked early on, "Since this is
going to be the biggest switch to an AES, what basic voter problems must we anticipate
to make the new process less painful?"

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A voter-centered approach would have led to shorter lines, a clear and easy process to
check voters' lists, sufficient staff to handle the bigger cluster of voters in the same small
space, and other fixes to basic problems that any alert manager would be able to spot
beforehand. Lucky for COMELEC and Smartmatic, Filipinos were feeling tolerant that
day (including me, who lined up at 10:30 am and got to vote at 7:10 pm).

Trustworthiness. Questions about how to make the central server trust the results
transmitted from remote machines must take second priority to the more important
question of how voters could trust the results reported by the system. Voting is one of the
core processes of our democracy. For the elections to work, we must trust the voting
process and this trust is hinged on the transparency of each step that is used to process
our votes. In the old way, government -- and by extension, the Filipinos -- owned the
major steps of the electoral process.

When we switched to the automated election system (AES), we outsourced the critical
steps to a single private corporation and those steps became hidden in a blackbox. To
make the system transparent and trustworthy to the public, we need to let the public see
the source code -- the set of instructions that tell the machines how to count, collate, and
transmit the results.

You cannot be more transparent than revealing those instructions in public. The
alternative, not revealing the source code, will always cast a shadow of distrust over the
AES, even with the safeguards and random checks instituted by Smartmatic (and to
which I also agree). Doubt will persist and will be exploited by malicious elements,
despite the fact that COMELEC Chair Jose Melo laughs off any threats. I am not arguing
on whether Smartmatic needed to open its source code in the past elections. What I need
to emphasize is the importance of requiring open source software on the next elections.

COMELEC deserves to celebrate for delivering the results and pushing the AES even
while many doubted it. However, the agency is in danger of being complacent (already, it
sounds annoyed when people try to point out rooms for improvement). COMELEC needs
to switch to a voter-centered perspective and now is the best time to build more
credibility by soliciting suggestions from voters on how to improve the coming elections.

---
Ruben Canlas Jr received his MBA from the Ateneo Graduate School of Business and MS
Information Technology from Carnegie Mellon University (as an AusAid Scholar). He is an IT and
management consultant for various the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and private and
government organizations.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-

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