Some countries that had used an automated election system similar to the one that the Commission on Elections bought from Smartmatic have reverted back to manual tallying and counting of votes.
Among these countries are Germany, Switzerland and Ireland.
In 2009, Germany’s Federal Supreme Court (SC) ruled against the automated election system because the use of electronic voting machines is contrary to the democratic and public character that elections must have.
The German Supreme Court also noted the electronic system’s flaws similar to those that Filipino experts have been warning the Comelec and the public about.
The biggest complaint against electronic ballot casting, reading and counting systems is their lack of transparency.
Nobody sees how the machines are reading each ballot. Then the machines report results that no one can verify.
Like the PCOS machines bought by the Philippine government, the machines in Germany did not print our receipts containing what the voter wrote down on his or her ballot.
Experts from CenPEG, AEStch and other institutions have been repeating that the problem in Philippine elections is not in the manual voting and the counting and tabulation that the Comelec officials, representatives of all parties, people from accredited watchdogs and the media can witness on blackboards or whiteboards.
The cheating is in the transmission of results and the fraudulent canvass.
With the midterm election tomorrow only hours away, the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) remain questionable to critics and election watchdogs.
Problems of the legality of using these machines as well as the accuracy and the possibility of “wholesale cheating” are just some issues raised by groups such as Automatic Election System (AES) Watch.
The practice of “electronic voting system” or facilitating the elections using machines to read and count votes was used