Thoughts about Vote Buying in the Philippines

Vote-buying in the Philippines can be understood as an instance of the classical prisoner's dilemma problem.On the assumption that a certain class of voters vote for the candidate who gives them money, then:Let's say you have two candidates, A and B. The strategy of candidate A while taking into consideration the assumption about voter behavior would follow this train of thought:

1. If Candidate B does not give out money to voters, then it will be better for me to give money to voters because this would increase my chances of winning their votes.

2. If Candidate B does give out money to voters, then it will be better for me to give out money too, in that way, candidate B won't have a definite edge over me. ( Note that this is a simplistic assumption because one could argue that the amount of money given by a candidate also matters in swaying a voter's decision. )

3. Regardless of whether candidate B gives out money or not, it is in A's best interest to give out money, because either way, this strategy would increase his chances of winning a voter's vote.

And candidate B would actually goes through the same analysis.

My observation with vote buying in certain towns in Samar showed that this kind of strategy actually works. Perhaps the assumption about voter behaviour used in this analysis is true. For the 2nd case, the one who wins is the one who gives out more money. So for this case, an 'auction' model becomes the appropriate model to describe vote-buying in most towns.

This analysis provides two classes of solutions (voter-centric or candidate-centric) that can be used in addressing this issue. The first one is a class of strategies that aims to change voter behaviour so that receiving money from the candidates won't affect their decisions on whom to vote. The second set of options follows a strategy whose theme is to make candidates be more honest in their methods.

Logistics wise, I'd personally select the second option because you only have to deal with relatively fewer people (towns in provinces) i.e.  100s candidates as compare to thousands of voters that you will have to re-educate and whatnot. This is a more viable solution, as compare to voter's education program currently used by COMELEC. If COMELEC really wants to curb vote buying, they should focus their resources on solving on the side of the candidates. Possible approaches are:

1) maybe thrrough the use of marked money. 

2) maglagay ng surveillance sa mga kandidato at mga tauhan nito especially a day before the election.
3) through candidate education, baka naman makonsensya sila hindi na mamimgay.

Does this make any sense?

Thoughts On Election Verifiability and the use of E-voting Systems in Philippine Election

I believe that precinct level manual counting provides very nice security properties that are important in ensuring election results integrity. At each polling precinct, counting is performed publicly and observed by representatives from different political parties and concerned organizations. At the end of the canvassing, election returns (ERs) are validated and then signed by different officials. This means that a malicious party needs to corrupt all of the election officials plus official observers who need to sign an ER in order to commit fraud. This possibility is assumed to have a very insignificant chance of happening considering the fact that official election observers are working for different political parties and have different interests to protect.

This process is inherently secure, except for polling precincts which the COMELEC do not have any kind of control e.g. isolated barangays and the likes.

In my opinion, the step that has the highest risk of being compromised is the "transmission" of these ERs from the polling precincts to the municipalities, provinces and the national board of canvassers. This is all where the magic of ballot box/ER switching occurs.

We don't need to implement a fully automated counting of ballots in our election because I believe that the current manual counting process still and already provides an adequate level of security.

However, it is in the transmission of ERs from polling precincts to the different aggregation sites where an e-voting technology could be put to good use. We could design and implement a system for transmission of ERs in electronic form, similar to the Consolation/Canvassing System (CCS).

With respect to our country's election, at the very least, aggregated election results should be verifiable up to the polling precinct level. This level of granularity might not give the same level of verifiability as in individual verifiability but I believe this is good enough given the inherent limitations in the way our national election is conducted.

Imagine that we could verify election results up to the precinct level. If the results are verified by individuals i.e. voters, located at different precincts all over the country, that could give us a higher level of confidence that votes from different precincts were counted and carried over correctly to higher levels up to the national level canvassing. For example, one could create a Facebook application which is populated with the electronic election returns publicly available in the COMELEC's election results server. An observer can verify that the recorded tally of votes posted in the COMELEC servers is the same with results showed in the official ERs posted in polling precincts. Board of Election Inspectors (BEIs) are required by law to post the ERs for their respective precincts within the vicinity of the precinct. So an observer could flag the results transmitted to the COMELEC server as either correct or incorrect.