The Hidden Costs of Clean Election Reform

Preface

vii Preface It was three o’clock in the afternoon when a crackling voice announced over tin-pot loudspeakers that the polls were now closed. I was sitting in the courtyard of Barangay Commonwealth High School, located in a poor and crowded section of Quezon City, the largest city in the Philippines and a part of Metro Manila. The school was serving as a polling place for the 2004 national elections, each classroom converted into a separate precinct, 117 in all. All around me in the courtyard were people who had come to vote but could not find their names on the voters’ list. In every election a certain number of voters cannot find their names, but the scale of exclusion in this election was different. I had been to this same high school three years earlier to observe voting during the 2001 elections. Then, about seventy voters could not find their names. Now there were a thousand or more. Oddly, many of the people milling about the courtyard held in their hands receipts given to them by the Commission on Elections (COMELEC) a few months before when they had registered for the first time or had had their registration “validated.”As part of its efforts to modernize elections, COMELEC had begun in 2003 to generate a centralized computer database—complete with digital photos,fingerprints,and signatures—of all registered voters. With 18 million dollars’ worth of newly purchased data-capturing machines, the poll body had asked all registered voters to have their registration validated in order to purge the voters’list of ineligible,fictitious,and double voters. People who did not validate would still be able to vote, COMELEC had informed everyone, but they would be placed on a separate “watch list” and subject to possible exclusion. Voters trooped to COMELEC offices around the country viii Preface and waited in endless lines to validate. By the end of the registration drive, about 6 million of the country’s 37 million registered voters had validated their registration, and another 6 million voters had registered for the first time. Problems arose,however,when COMELEC found itself unable to reconcile the old lists maintained by its field offices with the new centralized list generated by the data-capturing machines. According to COMELEC spokesperson Milagros Desamito (2004),the software used to manage the old list was incompatible with the software used to maintain the new list. When COMELEC tried to consolidate the two lists, a large number of names were dropped. Unable to work out a solution in its central office, COMELEC hastily advised its local officers, less than two weeks before the election, to generate their own voters’ lists, using their own records. In the ensuing scramble,the local COMELEC officer in charge of Barangay Commonwealth High School (one of sixty-eight polling places she oversaw) put many of the validated and new voters apportioned to the school into six newly created precincts. Her office prepared the voters’ lists but in the lastminute chaos made no provisions for the physical precincts. There were no classrooms, no ballots, no ballot boxes. Almost all of the people waiting in the courtyard were assigned to one of these six ghost precincts. Voter exclusion was not limited to this high school. Down the road, half of the voters assigned to the Payatas Elementary School were not able to vote. “They are turned off,” said the principal on election day, “because they have their voter’s registration record, they have been validated, and still they could not vote” (Philippine Daily Inquirer, May 11, 2004). News reports revealed similar patterns of exclusion in towns and cities across the country. An exit poll conducted by the Social Weather Stations, an academic survey research center, found that nine hundred thousand people—more than 2 percent of all registered voters nationwide—could not vote because their names were not on the voters’ lists. In Metro Manila, the rate of exclusion was nearly 5 percent (SWS 2004). A newspaper captured the prevailing mood when it published a cartoon portraying disenfranchised voters as a raging dog ready to lunge at a very nervous COMELEC (see figure 1). The scope of exclusion not only provoked anger but also put into question the very legitimacy of the elections. Among the offices up for grabs was the presidency, which pitted incumbent Gloria Macapagal Arroyo against a phenomenally popular movie actor, Fernando Poe Jr., and three other candidates. Arroyo was...