This has since become known as the ‘Hello Garci’ scandal. In the 2007 Senatorial race the result of an entire municipality’s vote temporarily vanished at the hands of a provincial electoral officer. When the ballots eventually resurfaced they reflected a statistically improbable result: 12 – 0 in favour of pro-administration candidates.

In light of such irregularities, the Commission on Elections (COMELEC) has determined to automate the coming elections, scheduled for 10 May 2010. COMELEC has taken delivery of 82,200 Precinct Count Optical Scanners (PCOS) and is confident the machines will not only deliver a rapid result following the election, but also make vote-rigging a thing of the past. Critics see the potential for the machines to be manipulated, where cheating could become just as fast as the count – and harder to detect. Ultimately any benefits obtained through changing the electoral process in this way must be weighed against key risks: Will automated voting deliver a credible outcome? How will those intent on manipulating the result adapt to the new electoral process? Could automated voting result in an unacceptable level of electoral violence?

An electoral process is only as strong as the trust electors place in it. Elsewhere in the world the fallibility of computers is leading to a lack of trust in automated electoral processes. Voting machines are vulnerable to tampering at many stages in their life-cycle. While security measures can be implemented to manage these risks, increased complexity can undermine credibility if electors do not understand how the integrity of their vote is protected.

While the Philippines has sought to address some of these concerns by opting for optical scanning machines, where voters feed a paper ballot into a machine to be instantly tallied, electors will not be able to verify how their vote has been recorded by the PCOS machine. Further, while a paper trail of voter intentions will exist, it remains unclear how a discrepancy between precinct and aggregated results will be resolved. It is hard to believe that after decades of experience with electoral fraud, Filipino electors will immediately trust automation.

Another key issue for a credible result is the need for electoral monitoring and certification by trusted civil society groups. With automation comes the need for more technical methods of electoral monitoring, such as testing of PCOS machines and review of the source code. So far, civil society groups have not been able to certify the integrity of the proposed hardware and software, while the process for auditing post-ballot results remains unclear. There is concern over the lack of transparency offered by COMELEC and the PCOS machine manufacturer, Smartmatic.

Of even greater concern is that for the first time since spearheading electoral monitoring in the Marcos years, The National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL), which is the largest and most influential electoral watchdog, has been denied accreditation by COMELEC—meaning they will be unable to conduct machine audits or a parallel vote count. At a time of such dramatic change in the electoral process, it is suspicious that this organisation will not participate in monitoring the ballot. Without the credibility of thorough civil society participation, it is unlikely automated voting will produce an uncontested outcome.

The next key risk is how political operators will adapt to the new electoral framework. The general consensus on automated voting is that while it resolves some concerns over electoral fraud at the ballot box, it creates new concerns in other parts of the system—particularly surrounding the transmission and aggregation of votes. The results of individual precinct PCOS machines will be sealed prior to transmission with a digital signature, issued only to the Board of Election Inspectors. However, the digital signatures will be generated and issued by Smartmatic, meaning that, in theory, electronic precinct tallies could be unlocked, tampered with, and resealed, before being sent on for aggregation.

The degree of access possessed by the system administrator is also another major threat to the integrity of the election. The so-called ‘God’ power of the administrator to edit results presents an unprecedented opportunity for widespread electoral fraud at the touch of a button. It is still unclear exactly how much access any system administrator will possess and what checks and balances are in place to prevent abuse of this power.

What is clear is that for those who would seek to manipulate the results, systemic access points remain. And so long as that is the case, it seems unlikely that cheating will be totally eradicated, so much as moved to somewhere else in the electoral process. Automated voting could well bring about the centralisation of electoral tampering where the power of local politicians to sway an individual electoral race is merely transferred to whoever wields influence over COMELEC and Smartmatic.

The automation process may also lead to greater electoral violence. With obvious difficulties around stealing an election at the ballot box, a change of tactics may be required. In the words of Benito Lim, a political scientist at Ateneo de Manila university: ‘The automation process has changed the rules of the game, and politicians who fear they can no longer manipulate poll results are more tempted to eliminate each other’. Indeed the pre-election death toll—including the massacre of over 40 civilians rival to the Ampatuan political clan in Maguindanao province late in 2009—is already much higher than in previous elections.

Voter intimidation at the local level is also likely to increase as politicians shift their efforts to changing electors’ votes before they are cast. Again, without the means to alter the ballot itself, local politicians are likely to turn to scare tactics to ensure victory—albeit in a more procedurally clean vote. Perversely, voter intimidation will actually become easier under the automated voting system, as each PCOS machine will be manned by an official tasked with helping voters to insert their ballot correctly, undermining rights to complete secrecy.

Lastly, there is a risk of greater post-election violence if voters feel they have been disenfranchised. It is currently expected that thousands of uneducated voters may be unable to vote because they cannot understand the automated voting system. Others are expected to lose their voice due to the high margin of error of the PCOS machines, which can fail to read between five and fifteen per cent of votes. Without clearly defined mechanisms for independent auditing and the resolution of irregularities in the vote, electors may have no alternative to violence should they suspect widespread fraud or disenfranchisement.

There can be no doubt that automated voting systems deliver both real benefits and real risks in determining outcomes. While in some countries this trade-off might be acceptable, in the Philippines, where there is little trust in the government or democratic institutions, automated voting is likely to create more doubt than it resolves.

Chris Urbanski is a graduate of the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University, who works for the Boston Consulting Group.