What will happen in the May 2010 elections in the Philippines? by Nostradino

It is a fact that the elections scheduled for May 2010 will be the first ever computerized elections nationwide. Many things can go wrong. School teachers who will operate the system are totally unfamiliar with it. There are more than 100,000 of them, the majority of whom have never operated or even seen a computer in their whole lives. The system needs 80,000 technicians, one for each cluster of precincts. Does the Philippines have 80,000 computer technicians? At the earliest, the machines will not be ready until this month. Does the country have enough trained technicians for the May elections?

Many towns do not have electricity or telephone connections. Even if the computerized counting machines were equipped with back-up batteries that will last supposedly for 18 hours, that may not be sufficient for remote communities that take hours to reach by foot, banca and/or carabao.

There will be about 300 candidates’ names on the ballot. How long will it take each voter to go through such a long ballot? Is there enough time for 200 voters per precinct to go through 300 names, before the batteries go dead? This will not be anything like Australia or the United States where voters vote by party, and the parties’ easily recognizable symbols are what voters mark. In the Philippines, voters choose individuals who most likely do not belong to the same party. The electoral laws allow even presidential and vice-presidential choices to come from different parties.

There are just too many things that can go wrong, or be made to go wrong, and likely will. That is Murphy’s Law. where anything that can go wrong does go wrong!

There is a strong possibility that even if we do hold computerized elections and even if we assume good intentions on the part of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) and the school teachers, we would likely have chaos, real and/or manufactured, on May 10 that will result in a failure of elections.

This is especially true for the national offices at stake – president, vice-president and senator – because of the sheer volume of voters expected, 40 plus million. Even a ten percent failure rate would render the exercise a total failure that cannot be resolved by a back-up manual count because of the sheer number of voters and the geographical spread involved.

Because of even only a ten percent failure rate, there will be no proclamation of a new president, a new vice- president, and 12 new senators by June 30, 2010, we will have no new government in place and we will have a constitutional crisis.

Section 7, Article VII of the Constitution says “Where no President and Vice-President shall have been chosen or shall have qualified, or where both shall have died or become permanently disabled, the President of the Senate or, in case of his inability, the Speaker of the House of Representatives shall act as President until a President or a Vice-President shall have been chosen and qualified.”.

In a failure of election scenario sketched above, there is no President or Vice-President proclaimed on June 30. There will also be no Senate President. The incumbent Senate President, Juan Ponce Enrile, is in office only up to June 30. He is running for re-election on May 10, but if there is failure of elections for national offices, no new Senate President will be chosen either because there will be no new Senate.

That leaves the Speaker of the House of Representatives as next in the line of succession, and I give you one guess as to who that Speaker is going to be. Hint: Gloria Arroyo is running for congress.