Philippines: Election Day – Observation
Nonpartisan Domestic Election Observers
Last updated on December 17, 2013
COMELEC accredits one or more groups as “citizens’ arms” for each election period. These groups are supposed to serve as civil society observers and simultaneously play a number of supportive roles throughout the electoral process. They also receive certain rights that give them greater access to observe aspects of the process that unaccredited groups do not receive, such as access to the central server that receives the transmitted precinct-level election results and receipt of paper copies of election results in the precincts.
For the 2010 elections, a limited number of civil society groups sought official accreditation as citizens’ arms. Controversially, there was only one group accredited – the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV), which received funding from the COMELEC to conduct voter education, election observation; staff voter education desks; participate in the Special Bids and Awards Committee; and organize the random manual audit.
Many independent civil society groups questioned whether the PPCRV was able to independently monitor the elections, given its dependence on the COMELEC for funding and its dual role to support the electoral management process and simultaneously monitor the process. Several groups conducted observation without accreditation, either because they were denied accreditation or chose not to seek accreditation due to concerns that becoming citizens’ arms could undermine their independence. These groups included:
- Procurement: Transparency and Accountability Network
- Technological preparations: Halalang Marangal
- Campaign finance: Pera’t Pulitika and Philippines Center for Investigative Journalism
- Overall election preparations and conduct: Bantay Eleksyon, a coalition of 47 organizations formed by the Consortium on Electoral Reforms
- Overall election preparations and conduct, with a focus on technology: Center for People Power in Governance (CenPEG), as part of the “30-30 Vulnerabilities and Safeguards” project (Project 30-30), which involved consultants and scholars covering computer science; programming and security; mathematics; and law. CenPeg also involved 12 regional coordinators and thousands of poll watchers from at least 50 provinces. CenPeg also conducted a post-election assessment in nine cities and provinces to verify incident reports.
- Polling and canvassing processes: NAMFREL and Consortium on Electoral Reforms (CER); both attempted to obtain election results from precincts and compare them to officially-reported results in thousands of precincts.
- Electoral violence: Vote Peace and National Task Force HOPE
- Legal monitoring and electoral disputes: LENTE and Libertas
- International observation: The Carter Center conducted a limited election observation mission from March through June 2010. It did not issue public statements during the election period, but did issue a final report following the elections.75 NDI organized an international pre-election delegation, which issued a report on March 13, 2010.76
Groups that attempted to observe elections on Election Day reported that they faced significant problems gaining access to polling stations, observing the transmission and obtaining copies of election results. This caused serious concern among observers, who contended that no independent group was able to genuinely observe Election Day conduct.
Given the challenges involved in observing the move to electronic technologies, greater capacity building and coordination among the groups would have produced a more effective observation of the 2010 elections. In particular, IT groups and traditional election observation groups did not coordinate their resources well enough to take advantage of each other’s strengths, knowledge and networks. Citizen observation groups, particularly those who lacked IT capacity prior to 2009, did not sufficiently refine their monitoring methodologies to take into account the new technologies of the 2010 elections. In many cases, they did not have the specific expertise to anticipate where problems could occur. Without official access to many aspects of the process, the groups often had to rely on access to contacts and relationships to gain access to information on COMELEC decisions and processes (insider information), rather than formal opportunities to observe such processes. Finally, several groups noted they should have better trained observers on understanding the new technology and its vulnerabilities.
Partisan Poll Watchers
Most major political parties and candidates organized partisan poll watchers to deploy to polling stations on Election Day. Parties in the Philippines have done this for many years under the manual election system, so the switch to electronic counting technologies presented a challenge. As in previous elections, parties and candidates tended to field poll watchers in locations and regions where they had a stronger ground presence and where they were most concerned about fraud. Some larger parties, such as the Liberal Party, educated campaign managers, candidates, lawyers, branch offices and poll watchers on the new technology, and how the PSCOs machines worked. However, since the general instructions were issued very late, it was difficult for parties to effectively train their poll watchers on how to monitor Election Day procedures. In particular, they recognize they did not adapt their trainings enough to take into account the new technology, where the vulnerabilities were and how to collect credible evidence in case of fraud or manipulation against their candidate/party.
Transmission and Tabulation
Data from the PCOS machines were electronically transmitted to the municipal, national and central consolidation centers immediately after closure of the polls using two transmission methods: cellular transmission through general packet radio service on the global system for mobile communications (GSM); and satellite transmission through Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN). Although the transmission was, in general, fast and efficient, there were reports of transmission failures or the inability of the consolidation centers to receive data. Approximately 85 percent of results were transmitted with direct electronic transmission, and 15 percent through physical delivery of compact flash cards to the municipal level.
Difficulties also emerged because of the COMELEC’s prescription that the electronic transmission of results must follow the reporting hierarchy used in manual elections. This system requires that data must be reported from precinct to municipality to province to the central server. Assessments of the AES noted that this system should have been abandoned, particularly since data communications at the main/central canvassing center were more reliable than those in municipalities and provinces. It would have been more cost effective and efficient to transmit results data directly to a central server.
To monitor the transmission process, several election observation groups had planned to collect precinct-level election results and compare them to the precinct-level results posted on the COMELEC’s website, which was required by law. This included the accredited PPCRV, and unaccredited efforts, such as the Bantay ng Bayan network, which included NAMFREL and Bantay Eleksyon of the Consortium on Electoral Reforms. Both mobilized thousands of observers on Election Day to collect precinct-level results. However, the comparison of results for a sizeable portion of precincts was not possible, in part because of a number of cases in which BEIs refused to provide observers – even PPCRV’s accredited observers – with a copy of the election results. Unaccredited observers had an even more difficult time entering polling stations and obtaining copies of election results. Further, in some precincts, the BEIs closed the PSCOS machines after transmitting results without printing copies of the election results for distribution. Most observer groups attributed these problems to a lack of training among BEIs about the rights of observer access to election results.
After several days, PPCRV was able to gather printed results from many precincts and compare them to results received by the national canvassing server that received results on Election Day. Of the precincts evaluated by PPCRV (which was not a random representative sample), approximately 0.06 percent of results showed discrepancies when compared to the central server.
The law requires that precinct-level election results be posted publicly on COMELEC’s website. However, on election night, the public posting of transmission results stopped after approximately 90 percent of the results had been posted. Thus, no results were publicly released for approximately 7,500 PCOS machines. The data was soon taken down by the COMELEC. Before it was taken down, a group of IT experts created a mirror image of the site for data analysis.77 They found a number of anomalies and missing data. For example, among precincts that did have data, nearly 40 percent had missing data in one or more candidate positions. COMELEC has never explained why full, precinct-level results were not released publicly, nor has it explained the apparent data errors on the website.78 This has raised serious concerns among some political contestants and civil society members.
76 http://www.ndi.org/files/Statement_of_Pre-Election_Delegaton_to_the_Philippines.pdf
77 Mirror website with election data: http://curry.ateneo.net/~ambo/ph2010/electionresults/res_reg0.html
78 COMELEC and Smartmatic representatives interviewed who had access to the three main servers reported that the data was complete on the main servers, but no one could provide a reason why the data was never posted on the website.
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Philippines: Post-Election Processes