The archipelago nation state of the Philippines recently held its national elections on Monday the 10th of May. Nothing was strange with this event save for the fact that this poll was for the first time employing an automated ballot-counting system, making the Philippines the first country in Southeast Asia to have fully ushered in and carried out the shift from manual to automated polls on a nationwide scale.

Kenya is equally set to follow in this shift in the near future; the target being the envisioned nationwide electronic poll in 2012. So what can be learnt from the Philippine experience given that two countries do share almost similar socio-economic and political experiences, starting from the common fact that both are rated third world low income developing countries?

According to an analysis by Roan Libarios, lead convener of Lente, a non-partisan watch group accredited by the Philippine Commission of Elections (Comelec) as a national citizen’s arm in the recent polls, an automated technology provides three major components to the electoral process namely voting, counting and transmission of results. Of the three, rapid counting of votes generated the highest marks in the country as per an election evaluation. Casting of ballots and transmission of results however floundered due to mismanagement and technical problems. With the latter two, long queues, given an almost 75% voter turnout, and sluggish pace of voting resulted in self disenfranchisement among voters, something that could have been avoided early on by proper management. Technically, glitches in result transmission resulted in untold delays in canvassing and proclamation, issues that could have been prevented by installing more modems, better quality of memory cards and overall efficient management.

Despite these glitches, it is an acknowledged fact that the automation system is there to stay, replacing the manual system of electioneering, rendering the latter obsolete. There are however a number of issues beyond the technical and management that still need to be addressed in order to make elections free and fair be it in the Philippines or Kenya.

While automation will definitely usher in change in the way elections will be held in developing countries, some things in the past will however remain constant. Bearing on the Philippine experience and one that is common in Kenya as well, automation will not address issues related to vote-buying in all its forms, voter intimidation and general violence. Libarios aptly states in this regard that with automation, electoral contests will change from the 3Gs to 4Gs- from guns, goons and gold, and also by glitches.

As much as an automated poll will modernize and speed up the ways of determining the will of the electorate, much of the substance of electoral politics may however remain largely unaffected. In the Philippines, political parties tend to be rather weak with wealthy political dynasties dominating ballots with traditional political families, built and nourished by patronage politics, still ruling the results of the recent polls.

The family of former despot, the late Ferdinand Marcos, has dominated the polls in the northern region of the country, with former first lady, Imelda, her son and daughter, already voted into various elective posts. In the county’s Cebu province, the Garcias have mowed down all challengers while in volatile Maguidanao, scene of a most recent horrendous election related massacre, the Mangudadatus are spurring with the Ampatuans. The same scenario equally holds true in most parts of the country where elections have been reduced to political clan rivalries, more so at the local level. At the national level, candidate personality tends to determine preference, not party platforms. Not much different with Kenya where patronage politics and ethnicity are the key characteristics of the electoral process. Therefore, if voter empowerment in all its form does not occur in Kenya, personalities, patronage politics and ethnicity, rather than party advocacies, will still dominate the outcome of an automated poll. 

Borrowing from the Philippine experience, it can be postulated that as much as technology may improve the conduct of elections in countries that are yet to be fully authenticated as democratic, it can however not alter the substance of electoral democracy. Given Kenya’s electioneering history, culminating in the bloodbath in 2007, automation may not necessarily bring the quality of electoral politics to the desired level of matured democracies unless it addresses much of the incoherence and weaknesses characteristic of its electoral culture and psych.

Two main issues therefore emerge from the Philippine experience relevant to Kenya; one is that on the use of ICT technology for electioneering purposes, and secondly on the political. Will Kenya and indeed many African countries be technologically ready to systematize electronic electioneering? Will there be assurance over fears of sabotage of the system by political establishments? Will voters show ignorance on the use of the system and equally be confident over the outcomes of the elections? Will failure of automation necessarily lead to failure of elections? Quoting John Naisbit, international bestselling author of ‘Megatrends’ and ‘Megatrends 2000’, as things change, others remain constant. Kenya, and Africa in general, need to address the constant as it anticipates a change to automated polls. The Philippine experience surely provides much food for thought.

Satwinder Rehal

Manila,

The Philippines.