Glad to be back. Hate to be back. Glad to be back because this is home. Hate to be back because everything looks more foreign here than elsewhere.

As I write this, my favorite newspaper has just reported that automated elections are on again. This is the latest, but probably not the last, chapter in a continuing saga that rivals the local soaps. Bearing all the signs of a shotgun marriage, TIM and Smartmatic have apparently patched up their differences and are on their way to the altar again.

So all’s well that ends well?

Not at all. My reason for saying this is not just that it’s another case of rewarding perfidy again. I do not know that TIM boss, Jose Mari Antuñez, is connected to First Gentleman Jose Miguel Arroyo, although he seems to share kindred attributes, notably in harboring an insatiable appetite. The witnesses did say that Antuñez was joking when he suggested that half a billion pesos had the mystic power to make problems disappear. But this is a regime where jokes have a way of being meant and things that are meant have a way of being jokes. Other countries—a perspective hammered home from having just been outside ours—routinely handcuff people who say those things and throw them in jail, with or without saying “joke lang.” Other countries usually give the public to have the last laugh.

But my more urgent reason for saying this is that I do not see how ’tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. I don’t know if Malacañang had a hand in the shotgun marriage, but I wouldn’t put it past the nocturnal creatures that inhabit that Transylvanian castle to have exerted themselves there. The whole thing seems calculated to make us supremely grateful we are going to have automated elections instead of a manual one.

The problem in fact is not between automated and manual elections. The problem is between one kind of automated elections and another. Specifically, between the kind of automation that ensures transparency and the kind that does not. The Comelec prefers the kind that does not. For reasons that are not hard to fathom. Since Ms Arroyo’s time, that body has not existed to oversee honest elections, it has existed to ensure the victory of Arroyo and her allies.

The groups who are protesting the Comelec’s automation are not opposed to automation. At least not all of them. They are opposed to this kind of automation. The IT community of this country is so. Gus Lagman showed what was wrong with this automation months ago.

First, it is expensive. When Lagman first warned about it, the Comelec budget for it was P11.3 billion. It subsequently awarded the project to Smartmatic for P7.2 billion, arguably a far cry from the original. But it is also still a far cry from what Lagman and others claim to be the reasonable cost for it, which should not exceed P4 billion.

Second, and far more importantly, it is not transparent. The software of the bidding companies is proprietary, which is just a sophisticated word for something only they know about. Or the integrity of whose results only they can vouch for.

Can software to count votes be rigged? Yes. It was done in the US last year, though to a marginal extent. Diebold eliminated all votes from 197 vote-by-mail ballots cast in a single precinct in Eureka, CA. It moreover employed an audit system with a button that automatically cleared all audit logs, leaving no trace of the actual votes. The discovery was made only months after the elections—in a country that does not lack the means to do so. The possibility that software can be used to wreak “dagdag-bawas” (vote-padding and vote-shaving) here is there, a vote for one candidate being ticked off to another. And it can be wholesale, total, wrath-of-God apocalyptic.

Is Smartmatic a reputable company? Maybe yes, maybe no. I leave others to research on it. Its partner, TIM, must certainly raise eyebrows up to the back of the scalp. But whether they are so or not is beside the point. Even if a judge were a most trustworthy person, you’d be a fool to allow him to decide a case without a trial that is open to the public. You’d be a greater fool to trust Antuñez and partners to say that the vote was based on what their software said.

What makes all this infinitely more objectionable is that there is a system of automating elections that is cheaper and cleaner. That is the Open Election System which this country’s IT community has been pushing for. It calls for retaining the counting in the precincts—the real cheating happens in the canvassing, not in the counting of certificates of canvass (CoCs)—and then encoding the results using software everybody understands and can access, like Excel. The totals may be immediately posted on the Internet for the world to follow. At most this system will cost only an additional day (precinct counting takes from a day to a day and a half). And at most it will cost only P4 billion.

It is cheaper and cheaper and cleaner. But cheap and clean are clearly not concepts the Comelec, which is just an extension of Malacañang, understands.

Some months ago, Alan Peter Cayetano proposed awarding hackers a small fortune to try to hack into the Comelec’s automation system to test its integrity. I myself don’t know that anyone can, even if we are one country that has no dearth of talent there. But whether so or not, that is not the problem. The problem is not that the system can be hacked from the outside, it is that it can be hacked from the inside. The problem is not the invaders, it is the plotters. The problem is not “salakay,” it is “bantay-salakay” (protector-predator). So long as the system is not transparent, so long as it is more secretive than the feminine mystique, so long will it pose a bane, and not a boon, to the vote.

Be relieved that this kind of automated elections will push through after all?

You’ve got to be joking.