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.