With this virus not going anywhere anytime soon, it has become an absolute necessity for everyone to imagine all the different ways things will have to change. In a way, we’ve all been forced to become futurists, except that the future we’re envisioning isn’t going to come in a hundred years but, in many cases, as soon as tomorrow. Or, in the case of the Presidential elections, 2022.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume that we can easily and quickly amend all the necessary laws and regulations that currently govern election in our country. It isn’t carte blanche exactly because in what we are about to do, we are still limited by existing technologies and an unyielding deadline – the 9th of May 2022.
With one last reminder that – despite being grounded on existing technologies and capabilities – the rest of this article is completely speculative, off we go!
A new election scenario
By 2022, the coverage of the existing alternative modes of voting will have been expanded to include persons with disabilities, and the elderly. However, the vast majority of voters remain unable to access alternative modes of voting and will still have to go vote in person.
On that year, we will no longer speak of an Election Day, but of a Voting Period – three days to a week during which people can come to the polling place to cast their ballots. But to ensure that the numbers of people at the polling places remains at safe levels, the COMELEC will have already designated voting day assignments for everyone at least a month before voting starts. Unlike in past elections when people were free to come and vote whenever they wanted during election day, the 2022 polls will see a majority of the voter coming to vote on a specific day and at a specific time.
This will be achieved by the COMELEC through a mobile app, rolled out a year before, where voters could sign up and essentially book an appointment to vote. The app is also designed to facilitate the delivery of voter education, as well as campaigning by candidates, allowing users to access both voter education content from the COMELEC and campaign materials from all candidates. During the voting period, the app is also primed to send how-to-vote instructionals – including the reminder to bring your own pen – as well as hourly alerts informing the user of how crowded the precincts are at that particular time.
Once the voters arrive at the polling centers – the school campuses where elections take place – they will be greeted by contact tracing stations where they will be required to log in with their COMELEC app even as they have their temperature taken and recorded. Face shields, masks and gloves will be available for those who have none. Every voter will be provided with a disposable lab coats to wear over their street clothes. Once past the contract tracing stations, voters will see markers and cordons intended to enforce social distancing rules for the people waiting to take their turn to vote.
These guides lead to the largest and widest open space available on campus. The gym, the basketball court, or the soccer field or wherever students usually gather for flag raising ceremonies. These open spaces will substitute for the old polling places – cramped little classrooms where voting actually takes place.
With voting liberated from the tiny classrooms, clustered precincts – groupasings of individual voters – can grow in size. Since 2010, our clustered precincts have averaged about 800 voters each. In 2022, those clustered precincts will contain anywhere from a thousand to five thousand voters, drastically reducing the number of precincts and allowing the open space to be utilized and still maintain the appropriate distancing measures.
The vote counting machines themselves will have undergone many changes as well, including now being able to read ballot marks made with ordinary ballpoint pens. From being designed for use in a one-day, one-precinct, one-machine scenario, these devices will now have to be configured to operate continuously for up to five days, with up to five machines running simultaneously in each precinct, , allowing voters to maintain social distancing even as they cue up to slide their ballots in. And for transparency, these machines will, throughout the voting period, regularly update a public access website with real-time information on the number of ballots cast.
Under the hood, so to speak, these new demands placed on the vote counting machines will force a change in the automated electoral system’s core architecture so significant and far-reaching that, in hindsight, people will say that the 2022 elections was nothing short of a massive re-set of the COMELEC’s automation project.
Once they’re done voting, voters make their way to exit stations where they are required to take off their protective gear, placing them in appropriately marked disposal bins. After going through mandatory hand hygiene protocols, the voters are required to log out with their mobile apps. This last log out will, of course, serve contact tracing purposes but it will also sign the user up to receive post-election updates, including election results.
A final note
Snap back to reality and, of course, much of what this article envisioned will remain firmly confined to the realm of what is possible. But there are some parts of it that are more probable than others. The theoretical mobile app I described, for instance, only combines the functions of various apps already in use. It shouldn’t be too difficult a challenge for any mobile app developer to turn into reality.
This article was originally published in the BusinessMirror.