Electronic voting no threat yet to the old style ballot box FEATURE 07/13/2010

Electronic voting no threat yet to the old style ballot box

FEATURE 07/13/2010 HONG KONG — They held elections within days of each other: The Philippines, a lively democracy where politicians get shot dead in the street and Britain, the rock solid “mother of all parliaments.” But the Asian state’s quick-fire digital vote made the European nation look more like a grandmother as its citizens stuck to the old style of dropping bits of paper in battered old boxes. It was hoped electoral automation in the Philippines would cut rampant cheating, where ballot boxes went missing or were stuffed with fake votes and local officials sometimes simply fiddled the results themselves. There was also the logistical nightmare of collecting votes from a country made up of over 7,000 islands, some of them tiny. In Britain, there were angry scenes outside a handful of polling stations which had closed before thousands of people had voted on May 6, leading some commentators to describe it as a “third world” ballot. In the Philippines, Venezuelan company Smartmatic won the contract to run the electronic election. Voters still had to go to a booth and mark a piece of paper, but it was fed into a machine for counting, not a ballot box. The results were then sent electronically to election headquarters in Manila, with 30 copies printed out and sent to stakeholders as a back up..... MORE Source:  The Daily Tribune URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20100713com3.html

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