Even though I'm based in the Philippines, I stay tuned over Fox News and CNN to see the election day on USA. The election was already going on within the first batch of states and just a few minutes later, the results are in. US News channels are racing against each other to be the first to tell the results. At first, presidential candidate Sen. John McCain was leading with the electoral vote tally, then a sudden lead for Sen. Barack Obama in the electoral votes came. As the polls close, it seemed that Sen. Obama has the lead. Then it came, three hours later, Obama was proclaimed the winner with more than 270 electoral votes from different states.
It was an astonishing event that the world has ever seen.
But, what made me astonished is that it took only a few hours to proclaim the next president of the most powerful nation in the world. Polls were computerized, everything was so organized.
Now it made me think that recently, I've seen in the local news that a computerized voting system is being forwarded for approval in the Philippines for the 2010 election. A group of bidders came to the goverment and presented their deals of automated machines that will serve as the voting poll.
To me, it was like a nice move by the government to gain back the trust of the nation. Every election in the Philippines that I've witnessed within my seventeen years of life seemed to be dirty and bloody. And with that computerized voting scheme, the upcoming election won't repeat what happened to the previous years.
Votes back then were counted manually by underpaid public school teachers. And when evening comes, the next day, people would hear in the news that a precint staff was murdered and the ballot box stolen. A voting precint classroom was burned down by some mercenaries, trapping the staff inside and killing them and at the same time, burning the ballots. This is actually so common here. And even before the election, a candidate would be in the news--ambushed, murdered, and even forced to step down. That is how dirty politics here.
Now back to the computerized election, it is a very great idea to keep the election clean. No more stolen ballots, no more precint teachers killed and robbed, no more sabotaging of classrooms for the children who need it.
The plan was going smoothly in the introduction of it on how it works, it was fool proof. All the data is immediately forwarded to the election commission, so foul play can be greatly avoided.
Then a group of officials suddenly opposed to this scheme and insisted to keep the election handled manually. Their reason was the government spending, that there's too much money concerned with it and the number of contractors that are suspected to be fictitious.
Then the project was dismissed and was never heard of, until now.
In my opinion, the money that's going to be used on this project is not even a good reason the oppose this. If this computerized election was going to be implemented, then don't they(opposing officials) even think that the Philippines will end up with more righteous officials and actually stop unnecessary release of funds? The poor Philippine nation has suffered enough with their votes ending up into the corrupted menaces of our society. We don't need more corrupted leeches feeding into the money of the nation.
