Brain Contour

PCOS Election Machine

A TV host said that the Filipino ingenuity came out in the ongoing Philippine national election. Why? Being the first ever election to be automatedusing the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) election machine, the fear of malfunctions happening in poll locations around the country is high. And the widespread fear seems to be coming true, even at the time of this writing. There are already reports of the machines being clogged and not working properly, and that manual voting has been implemented in many precincts.

The initial goal of the poll automation was to speed up the count of some 50 million voters and help avoid human error or rigging. Now what — is this what we call speeding up election results through spending 7.2-billion pesos (US$149 million) for a project that seems to fail?