As the 2025 midterm elections near, various organizations gear up to ensure an improved voting system and process. For the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV), one of the main improvements they had to the election system was its transparency with the public.
IT Director Dr. William Yu discussed during the TownHall: Preview of the 2025 Elections on Sunday, November 2024, the improvements were made to ensure a more convenient and easier voting process for Filipinos. For this episode, the PPCRV IT Director broke down how the three major systems were improved and changed according to the public’s previous comments.
The election process greatly relies on the process of counting the number of votes each candidate has. With the previous elections, several issues with voting systems and machines occurred, causing delays with the election results. Now, Yu said that they began the improvements by ensuring better coverage and mobile connectivity with a new global satellite network.
For the upcoming elections, the Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN) satellite will be used. Compared to the Starlink satellite, Yu said that BGAN is further away, so people can expect better performance. It is also more portable and easier to set up.
The Online Voting System
Apart from that, Yu highlighted one of the biggest new features, the addition of the online voting system. Through the new system, Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) would be allowed to vote through their phones and a web browser, in certain posts around the world.
“It actually makes it more convenient for the OFW. If you live in some state (in the) USA like Texas, you don’t have to drive all the way to Los Angeles, or the nearest post just to vote; or to send in your mail in a ballot if they arrive,” Yu said.
“I think that is something we should be looking forward to. And of course, since it is online, technically our seafarers can also vote. So people who have historically found it difficult to vote overseas, are now expected to be able to vote easier through online voting, which is the third major component to this election,” he added.
A New Requested Feature
Moreover, the PPCRV also requested that the Voter-verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) and Election Returns (ERs) have QR codes to increase transparency.
“Instead of what we used to do, we used to encode each ER twice, which does take a certain amount of time. Now, we can just scan the QR codes for the results, and we can compare them to the electronic results,” the PPCRV IT Director explained.
“The process would be, instead of encoding the results, we scan the QR code (and) we compare it to the printed results. And then compare it to the automated results,” he added.
The organization requested the key feature from the Commission on Elections (COMELEC), as a way to increase transparency for the automated election cycle.
Pinpointing Liability and Other Issues
For Director Yu, the benefit of unbundling resides in allowing more vendors to participate, instead of just one for the entirety of the election process. According to him, this is one of the advantages when it comes to dealing with issues and certain liabilities.
“The project management of this entire exercise will fall on the shoulders of the COMELEC. They have to make sure that each vendor delivers, according to the terms of reference and the needs of the election; and ideally, they’re also the ones supposed to pinpoint if there are problems,” Yu said.
Additionally, the PPCRV IT Director cited an example of a challenge they encountered. He said that they raised a few points of interaction with the COMELEC on the OVCS system. According to Yu, that action needs to be facilitated, but they trust that the COMELEC will find a solution for such issues.
“We are counting on the COMELEC to ensure that those things run smoothly,” he said.
“As observers, we are also ensuring that we watch these particular cases and we point them out as we see them. If we feel that there are certain things that need extra attention, we will point them out as well,” he added.
