Commission on Elections

Editor's Note: This is part 2 of a three-part series on the brief history of automated elections in the Philippines. This despite the history in automating their elections, a development expected to increase electoral accountability, integrity, and transparency. For instance, Pulse Asia reports that 7 percent of Filipinos in 2019 still believe there is cheating in elections, compared to 10 percent in 2016 and 13 percent in 2013. In an electorate of over 67 million voters as of 2022, that would still translate to some 4 million Filipinos who might distrust the outcome of elections. Of course, the Philippines is not alone when it comes to coming up with conspiracy theories in democratic elections, albeit the voter turnout in the Philippines, averaging 76 percent from 2010 to 2019, can still be regarded as relatively high. Since automated elections began in 2010, the process goes like this: the voter marks their preferences in ballots, puts the marked ballots in the PCOS machine, and at the end of the day, the votes are counted electronically. Besides the central server of the Commission on Elections (COMELEC), a transparency server operated by election watchdogs operate as soon as the returns are transmitted. In 2013, a voting pattern dubbed as "60-30-10" went rounds in the web and caused concern for some about the credibility of automated elections. Read more in our articles including "A brief history of automated elections in the Philippines (Part 2)" and "Comelec servers hacked, over 60GB of data downloaded".