Imagineering the Future of Elections

Despite the threat of COVID-19, the National and Local Elections of 2022 – a Presidential race, in case that little fact has slipped your mind – will most likely still involve more than 45 million voters, crowding into less than a hundred thousand polling places nationwide. Even two years down the road, those are still ideal conditions for a coronavirus superspreader scenario. To cut down on the number of people going to polling places and potentially spreading or catching COVID-19, we really ought to be looking seriously at two existing alternatives to in-person voting: absentee voting and voting-by-mail. As currently practiced, absentee voting is only available to government employees who have been called on to perform election duties, and members of the media. This is accomplished by sending blank absentee ballots to the heads of office – including commanding officers in the case of police and military personnel – who are then tasked to conduct the elections in their respective government offices or units. After the ballots are filled out, they are then returned – by the heads of office again – to the COMELEC. Members of the media seeking to vote in absentia, on the other hand, are simply told to go to the COMELEC office where they filed their applications for absentee voting. The voting period for both runs three days, and take place well in advance of election day. Voting-by-mail or postal voting, on the other hand, simply involves mailing blank ballots to qualified voters and waiting for those ballots to be mailed back. The voting period runs for 30 days, with the end coinciding with the close of voting on Election Day. Unfortunately, under the laws that institute these alternative modes of voting, the voters are able to vote only for those positions which are nationally contested, i.e., President, Vice-President, Senators, and Party-List Representative. There are several rationalizations for this particular limitation – most of them rooted in arguments of practicability. It has been argued, for instance, that since votes gathered via these alternative modes are not counted at the local levels, having the local count – which ends with the proclamation of local winners such as Members of the House of Representatives, Governors, Vice-Governors, Mayors, Vice-Mayors and Sanggunian members of all levels – wait on the absentee and postal vote results would unduly delay local proclamations. I’ve also heard the tongue-in-cheek argument (demonstrably false, by the way) that the people who avail of these alternative modes – particularly overseas voters – are so far removed from local politics that they probably won’t care to vote local anyway. However it may have been justified, the fact remains that essentially cutting the franchise in half has been deemed an acceptable trade-off for the relatively miniscule numbers of people actually availing of those alternative modes thus far. However, when you start talking about scaling up the coverage of absentee and postal voting, giving up the local vote quickly becomes an unconscionable cost. To fix this, there must be a broad effort to creatively re-engineer – to imagineer, if you will – how the entire counting and canvassing system works – not just the voting. The observation that absentee and postal votes are not counted locally and might therefore delay the proclamation of local winners is a fairly valid point – but, I submit, only in the context of how we do things now. Imagine what could be possible is we were unbound from those old procedures and freed to re-design the entire voting, counting, and canvassing system from the ground up. This was what Congress did when they approved and subsequently amended the Automation Law; when they approved the mandatory use of biometrics for voter registration; and yes, when they synchronized elections. This kind of paradigm shifting is precisely the point of the “new normal” concept, and the same kind of energy and thinking can and should be applied to electoral processes now. It’s going to be a big challenge, and it will be a long-haul effort. Which means that we can’t put this off until a year before the elections. We must start now. Thankfully, there are apparently already moves to expand the coverage of these alternatives to include several vulnerable sectors – persons with disabilities, indigenous peoples, the elderly, and pregnant women, and that’s awesome. But, dollars to donuts, I’m betting that those moves will keep the existing “national positions only” limitation. And in any case, simply expanding the coverage of alternative voting modes to additional sub-sets of the voting population will only benefit that handful of voters, but it probably won’t make a significant difference in the number of people going to the polling places on election day. It would be ideal if more could be done. It has been common to think of COVID-19 as being destructive of our way of life. And it is. But we can also see it as having provided us an opportunity to shed the old ways of doing things; to re-write the whole democracy playbook and, in doing so, rationalize election procedures and processes in the light of the new realities COVID-19 has thrust upon us, leveraging modern technology, and drawing on best practices from all around the world. With a little bit of imagineering, we can even choose to quit trying to fit square pegs into round holes. This article was originally published in the BusinessMirror.