Alarming development

On Friday, just over a week before the May 13 elections, the National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel) announced an alarming development: It was withdrawing as an accredited watchdog for the polls, after the Commission on Elections (Comelec) turned down its request to access key election data.

Namfrel said the Comelec had denied (or, in the words of its spokesperson James Jimenez, “simply not granted”) its request that its election website receive information it needed, among them election returns, information on candidates’ spending, the voters’ list, the number of precincts and related precinct statistics.

The Namfrel website, the election watchdog said, was designed to do a full audit of the election exercise by analyzing data, highlighting possible “red flags” in the system and addressing irregularities.

Access to such data would have allowed Namfrel to monitor and independently track the authenticity of election results, and allow it to provide the public near real-time information on the elections.

The Comelec’s refusal to grant that request means that, aside from being given the 27th copy of election results generated by the vote-counting machines, Namfrel’s role would now be limited only to participating in the random manual audit, which involves the manual inspection and counting of ballots from randomly selected clustered precincts.

To fears aired about a possible data breach in its website operations, Namfrel said it planned to head off such risks by using hash codes and the encryption of personal information.

But the Comelec appeared to have leaned on more basic grounds in rejecting Namfrel’s request: Having election results coming from two sources could confuse the public, it said. “What happens when you have two competing sources of election information?” asked Jimenez.

Why, you allow the public to compare the sources and the reliability of the information, for starters: What is the source’s record of integrity? And how near or far apart are the data from the two sides, which should indicate gaps or outright irregularities that may need to be addressed?

Shouldn’t transparency be paramount in elections, after all? Isn’t that precisely why elections need an independent citizens’ arm and election watchdog—not to echo official results, but to go through them with a fine-tooth comb to check for inconsistencies, oversight errors and possible lapses, and ensure that the public get the most accurate information available at any one time?

Instead of canceling each other out, having two sets of counting would serve as a countercheck or validation of the official tally; in short, two pair of eyes to independently vet the results. What could be more ideal, especially with a midterm elections that may be the most crucial in years?

The 2019 campaign has seen candidates pulling out all the stops to win, and the Comelec itself suffering from a credibility deficit due to its inability to resolve blatant election violations such as alleged vote-buying in many places, oversized posters and tarpaulins, overspending among candidates, the brazen use of government resources, etc.

What makes the Comelec’s move all the more confounding is that it has had a good partnership with Namfrel all this time. Except in the 2010 elections when it failed to get accreditation, Namfrel has been the Comelec’s main citizens’ arm in all the Philippine elections since 1983, when a group of volunteers and concerned citizens formed Namfrel precisely as a foil to the manipulated election results that had become the norm during the martial law years, when the Comelec was used as a rubber stamp to legitimize the choices of the dictatorship.

During the snap elections of 1985, 30 Comelec computer technicians walked out of their jobs, bothered by the yawning discrepancy between the figures on their screen and those on the official tabulation board. The walkout—proof of the poll body’s complicity with the ruling party—contributed to the spark that later became the 1986 people power revolt.

If the current impasse holds until the elections on Monday, it will mark only the second time that the Comelec will not be working with Namfrel. And that may impact on the public perception of the Comelec’s fair conduct of the polls. More than an issue of transparency, access (or the lack thereof) to election data by an independent citizens’ arm is a matter of basic rights — the people’s right to know that their will via the ballot box is not being thwarted or tampered with in any way. Why is the Comelec seemingly eager to run that risk all of a sudden?