A noise for news

Even a few days after the 2016 elections, the mood remained cranky in the so-called social media. Claims still lingered like annoying flies at the Payatas dumpsite, some aggressive comments about “cheating” going around Viber, Twitter, Facebook and the like.

At the end of the day, we could say that the Comelec did a pretty damn good job, even with the elections costing P10 billion to P15 billion all in all.

Nobody could deny that the conduct of the elections already earned praises in local and foreign news media for being relatively efficient.

Indeed the public did get the news on more than 90 percent of the results within a day after the elections, which never happened before.

In the 2004 elections 12 years ago, for instance, the counting took so long that we hoped it would be over and done with before the mid term elections in 2007.

So the Comelec was correct to claim that it had set a new record in the speed of the count and the transmission of the results.

To think, the Comelec still had to face up to various issues just a few weeks before the elections that in a big way hampered its preparations.

At the last minute, for instance, the Supreme Court ordered the Comelec to issue verification “receipts” to each and every one of the 55 million voters.

The Comelec also had to resolve all sorts of contorted issues on the qualifications of the candidates, even needing to defend itself before the Supreme Court.

In the midst of it all was the logistics nightmare of shipping more than 90,000 highly sensitive voting machines all over the country of more than 7,000 islands.

But the scary part was the widespread speculation before the elections about some massive cheating, courtesy of the Aquino (Part II) administration.

One photograph even showed some pre-shaded ballots, allegedly the blueprint to secure the victory of the chosen candidate of our leader Benigno Simeon, aka BS.

Although they dented the credibility of the Comelec, none of the ghost stories propagated by some loudmouths in social media actually happened.

As expected, vilification of the Comelec continued after the elections, with reports that more than 2,000 voting machines broke down just like that.

Obviously the reports did not say that the Comelec—and perhaps its supplier, Smartmatic—solved most of the glitches, and they replaced some 143 machines.

Understandably so, because foreign firm Smartmatic has always been the favorite whipping boy of some politicians in the past automated elections.

One politico for instance came up blazing in the news against the Comelec, citing some statistics that nobody could really verify.

For instance, he claimed that some 2,500 precincts reported problems in the counting machines, although he forgot to say what kind of problems.

In the high tech world of automation, the “problem” could be anything, such as loose electrical socket.

Good grief, Charlie, the problem would even involve a cockroach that threatened the poise of some society matrons in the voting precincts or something.

Some isolated cases, in which the voting machines apparently rejected some ballots or the receipts showed bizarre results, could become problems worse than climate change or the ISIS threat, all needing the attention of world leaders.

Stop it, please, because the Comelec and its suppliers actually delivered on time thousands of machines all over the archipelago—a task not exactly a walk in the park!

In 2004, as I said, back in the days of manual elections, it would take the Comelec at least 40 days to process the votes.

This time around, the Comelec processed some 45 million votes with a turnout of about 84 percent, deemed to be the highest in recent history of this country.

Granted—the canvassing in 2016 still mimicked the old process, under the manual election, in which the data traveled from the precincts to the municipal, then to the provincial, then to the regional and, finally, to the national levels.

Still, despite the circuitous process, the public could keep track of the results in real time.

Upon suggestion of a former Comelec official, the Comelec chose to post them online also in real time on its “transparency server” that was available to everybody.

Thus, because of modern technology, the public already had a good idea of the results only a few hours after the polls closed.

This was already verified: The Comelec was able to transmit some 80 percent of the vote within four hours after the closing, with more than 60 percent of results transmitted after only two hours.

Again—after two hours, 60 percent transmitted, compared to 20 percent in the “automated” elections in 2013, or 17 percent in 2010.

Here could be an interesting fact: 13 regions started transmitting the results only one minute after the polls closed.

In just one day after the elections, or before office hours ended on May 10, the automated system has already processed more than 41 million votes, or about 94 percent of the total.

Yes, that fast— and I would really attribute it all to the 300,000 or so Filipinos that worked on this, our biggest election so far.

As for the persistent noise in social media that could never pass for hard news, well, let us just grin and bear it.