"The COMELEC found itself in a state of emergency on Tuesday, March 8, after a Supreme Court ruling practically required the poll body to overhaul crucial processes that took months to finish." - Rappler
"This may go against the celebratory mood of most people but the SC decision on the printing of receipts as VVPAT mechanism for PCOS might create more problem than solution. Why?
1) As per COMELEC statistics, we have 54.3 M registered voters divided in 92,509 Clustered Precincts (CP), so in theory, you'll have 586 voters per CP. Printing of receipts will take 13 seconds while reading and confirming might take 20-30 seconds (note: this is a conservative estimate not yet considering our special needs sector) so that's 33-43 seconds per voter. Thus, voting time will have to be extended by 19338 seconds (5.37 HOURS)- 25198 (6.99 HOURS). Considering the 2013 elections that operated from 7am to 7pm, we're looking at closing precincts now at around 12AM-2AM.
2) The need to reconfigure 96,096 PCOS considering printing of receipts is not included in the present model. I'm not yet sure if they have to reconfigure the software or/and hardware of the machines.
3) Remember that we are not allowed to bring receipts outside the polling center because they need to be surrendered and put into ballot boxes? Yup, we have to buy those ballot boxes too. Let's assume that 1 CP needs 1 ballot box, so we will be needing 92,509 ballot boxes. 1 ballot box will incur 3,000 pesos ( AES watch versus COMELEC) so that's an additional cost of 277 M pesos for an election that's already spending 12 BILLION already. I'm not yet mentioning the 1.2 M additional rolls of thermal paper.
"This may go against the celebratory mood of most people but the SC decision on the printing of receipts as VVPAT mechanism for PCOS might create more problem than solution. Why?
1) As per COMELEC statistics, we have 54.3 M registered voters divided in 92,509 Clustered Precincts (CP), so in theory, you'll have 586 voters per CP. Printing of receipts will take 13 seconds while reading and confirming might take 20-30 seconds (note: this is a conservative estimate not yet considering our special needs sector) so that's 33-43 seconds per voter. Thus, voting time will have to be extended by 19338 seconds (5.37 HOURS)- 25198 (6.99 HOURS). Considering the 2013 elections that operated from 7am to 7pm, we're looking at closing precincts now at around 12AM-2AM.
2) The need to reconfigure 96,096 PCOS considering printing of receipts is not included in the present model. I'm not yet sure if they have to reconfigure the software or/and hardware of the machines.
3) Remember that we are not allowed to bring receipts outside the polling center because they need to be surrendered and put into ballot boxes? Yup, we have to buy those ballot boxes too. Let's assume that 1 CP needs 1 ballot box, so we will be needing 92,509 ballot boxes. 1 ballot box will incur 3,000 pesos ( AES watch versus COMELEC) so that's an additional cost of 277 M pesos for an election that's already spending 12 BILLION already. I'm not yet mentioning the 1.2 M additional rolls of thermal paper.
Ross is known as the Pambansang Blogger ng Pilipinas - An Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Professional by profession and a Social Media Evangelist by heart.
