COMELEC's State of Preparedness for the May 14, 2001 Elections

Alfredo Benipayo
Chairman, Commission on Elections
May 4, 2001

Thank you very much, Joe, for the very kind introduction, and Dick, you will be my friend even after the elections. Well, I do not know how to address you, but, to avoid any breach of protocol, let me just address all of you as my dear friends in the Makati Business Club. I want to make a slight correction to what Joe said. It was not three weeks after office that I had an operation, it was on my fifth day in office. I don't know whether my colleagues contributed to that condition, but I'm perfectly alright now. I had angioplasty. My heart condition really was there even before I assumed office as Chairman of the COMELEC. The day I took my oath, I had a treadmill. My doctor said, "We see a block in one of your arteries. To make sure that it's there, you better undergo an angiogram." So, fine. "When do you want this?" We set this five days after. It's true enough, not only one, but three of my arteries were severely blocked. "It's true," the doctor said. I was a walking time bomb. That condition has been there for years because of stress in my work as court administrator and even before that. Luckily, the operation was very successful. That was on a Friday, my fifth day in office. Sunday, I left the hospital, St. Luke's. The following day, I went back to work. I said I can't afford not to go to work because when I assumed office, there were only 85 days left before election. I wish it were 85 days before Christmas.

Well, I'm very glad that I have been invited to come here and speak with you regarding the state of preparedness of the COMELEC. Sun Tzu, a warrior philosopher, once wrote that a good general picks his own battleground and prepares it for his greatest advantage. I have taken this advice to heart, and I believe I have prepared our ground well. When the President offered me the post of COMELEC Chairman, I had my misgivings. It was already February, and I knew little enough about putting together a major electoral exercise. This made me think twice before accepting the honor. Still, the call to public duty was a siren song that I could not turn a deaf ear to. It was a leap of faith more than anything else. I found out that getting the election off the ground will require much more faith. As of February 19, my first day on the job, the level of COMELEC preparation for the May 14 poll was approximately 0%. Precincts have not been established with any source of finality. Voters lists were incomplete. There was no information dissemination campaign to speak of. After all, what information was there to disseminate?

The principal reason for the deplorable state of the COMELEC that I stumbled into was the precinct-mapping project. To be more precise, it was the implementation of that project that was causing problems. The theory behind precinct-mapping may be sound enough but its implementation was plagued by numerous delays. As a result, by the middle of February, it was still not finished and the deadline for its completion had been moved for the nth time to the end of that month. At that point, I needed to make a decision. On the one hand, there were numerous benefits to be derived from the precinct-mapping project; on the other, there was a need to start preparing for the election. If we waited for the completion of the project which, from all indicators, didn't seem likely to happen as scheduled, the commission would have been unable to begin preparing for the elections.

Allow me to explain. Elections, when you get right down to the bones of it, is a question of logistics. It all depends on the commission's ability to move reasonably exact quantities of material and supplies to various points all over the archipelago within a very strict timetable. In order to do this, the commission must know how many precincts there are, and down to the last person, how many registered voters there are in each precinct. With this information, the commission then allocates supplies and election materials for each precinct. In effect, making an election-shopping list. The allocation tells us how many ballots must be printed for any particular precinct anywhere in the country and how many of each kind of election paraphernalia must be purchased, packed and shipped to the precincts. In other words, the allocation based on the knowledge of the composition of the precincts allows the COMELEC to move men and materials with the reasonable exactness that would prevent equipment and supplies shortages come election day. Without a sound allocation, we could end up shipping less than what is required, thereby possibly causing mass disenfranchisement. Or, we could send more than what is needed, thus rendering the process vulnerable to electoral fraud. Both outcomes are, of course, unacceptable.

At the time of my entry into the COMELEC, there were two voters lists, either of which could have been used as a basis for allocation: the 1998 computerized voters list supplemented by the list of newly registered voters, and the incomplete list generated by the precinct-mapping project. Under the 1998 CVL, the precincts were already established and would only have to be adjusted to accommodate the addition of newly registered voters. Under the precinct-mapping project, however, very few precincts were actually in place. If we opted to wait for the project completion at the end of February, we run a very real risk of another postponement of the deadline. Thus, further eating into the remaining lead time that we had, all 84 days of it. The decision that would have to be made was clear enough. Thus, I ordered the precinct-mapping project shelved and that we revert to 1998 CVL, as supplemented by the incremental list generated by continuing registration from July 1998 to December 2000. Only when this order was issued were we able to begin getting our preparation on track.

An unfortunate consequence of shelving the precinct-mapping project was the unavoidable recourse to a manual system of vote counting. And, so far, in ways I am still trying to uncover, the mandate of the law that we automate vote counting in time for the 2001 elections became confused with the need to modernize the commission. The need to establish automated counting methods has been subsumed under the concept of COMELEC modernization. Modernization is an all-encompassing term that speaks of the Commission's catching up and keeping pace with the rest of the world. It is not a place or a point in time but a continuing process. One does not wake up one fine day and say we're finally modernized. Modernization is a direction, not a destination. The use of automated vote-counting machines, on the other hand, was a very well-defined goal that could have been prioritized but was not. In fact, it was on the list of priority projects, but it was eclipsed by the precinct-mapping project which became the de facto flagship of the entire modernization program. Now, I will not go into the wisdom of not allowing that to happen, but the results ought to speak for themselves. We currently have only 65 counting machines. None of them well maintained and, presumably, some of them are not even operational. The money that should have gone towards testing automated counting machines, purchasing them, training operators, and educating the public were funneled to the precinct-mapping project and its various operational needs. Thus, automation, as mandated by the law, has become an impossibility for the 2001 elections. As a matter of fact, some lawyers asked me, "Will the elections to be conducted this year be valid or would it be void because under the law the election should be automated?" I said I would not want to answer that question. I might as well be practical about it. We either have the elections under the manual counting system, or we don't have any elections at all. It's because no preparation has been made for automation. In any case, once it was settled that we would put precinct-mapping project on the back burner, we were able to begin mustering our resources.

MORE >>