Making Elections Open and Transparent

A group of concerned citizens called the Advocacy for Open Systems in Elections is offering a free, open source solution for automating the counting of election results. Ito Gruet, a member of the group, was interviewed by Erwin Oliva of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, and the video of the interview is available on the Inquirer website as “Pushing open source solutions for elections“.

Gruet revealed that the group advocating the use of open standards and open source software for the automated election system, which would help ensure the transparency of the electoral process. Gruet explained:

Basically it’s to ensure that we are able to track and trace back to a source document and audit the results of the elections. And what we are proposing is the we make this process tranasparent to the public… to all the voters. Transparent in terms of the technology to be used, so we should be using open standards. We believe that the software should be open source so that people in the know can look at it, can review, and see if it’s really a working system. Transparent in terms of the data itself, which means that results should be easily verifiable by the public, and anybody can do their own tabulation.

In another interview by Oliva, “Open source ‘required’ for poll automation systems“, Dr. Pablo Manalastas, associate professor of computer science at the Ateneo de Manila University, noted the difficulties involved in maintaining the integrity of the count if the solutions used proprietary software.

In contrast to the free solution offered by the group, the COMELEC confirmed that it will sign a contract with Avanti to automate the elections in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). The Inquirer, in “Comelec, Avanti to sign contract for automated ARMM polls” reported:

Commission on Elections (Comelec) chairman Jose Melo said the poll body will sign the final contract with technology supplier Avanti after the company passed testing requirements Tuesday.

“The Avanti testing was finished and we’re going to sign the contract tomorrow (Thursday),” Melo told INQUIRER.net.

He made this revelation just after the Comelec officially kicked off the start of automating the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) elections scheduled August 11.

It may be too late to get the open system into the ARMM elections in August, but uere’s hoping the group’s free solution will be taken up by the goverrnment in 2010, instead of the costly solution that will be deployed for the ARMM polls. After all, why buy when you can get it free? Sounds like a no-brainer to me.

But will our government do the right thing? Ah… that is such an interesting question!