The automated election system that will be used on Monday is a complex collection of several component subsystems that is expected to function as one during election day. These subsystems are expected to pass on verified tallies of the results at each stage of the polling process. If any one of them fail, there would be problems with regard to the veracity of the final count and tally that will be used as the basis for proclaiming winners of the electoral contest.

It might come as a surprise to local readers to know that actual voting for the May 2010 national elections have already started for many Filipinos abroad. In many of our embassies and consulates, overseas citizens have already cast their choices for president, vice president, senators and party-list. Some voting centers like Hong Kong and Singapore are using the same Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines that are to be deployed throughout the country for the automated election system (AES).

It might come as expected to a lot of us by now that the Comelec’s automated election system (AES) encounters one problem after another. Recently, news came out that the markings on the ballots for the May polls are unreadable by the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines that will be used in the upcoming national and local elections. According to the Comelec itself, errors in the ultraviolet (UV) markings printed on the ballots are due to the high-speed printing process used by Smartmatic.

Last week’s column which tackled our time-motion simulations made a lot of people worry about one of the aspects of the upcoming automated election system (AES): the possibility of a long line of voters unlike what we used to have in the past elections.

The upcoming May 2010 elections is an experiment of sorts. We will have the first automated national elections with more than 50.7 million registered voters. Voters from more than 329,000 precincts will troop to 76,000 clustered precincts (CP). Each CP will have at most one precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machine for around 1000 voters.

We are reissuing this statement for the 2010 elections. Bayan Muna is running under the Makabayan coalition who has Rep. Satur Ocampo and Lisa Maza running for Senate.

AGHAM: WE SUPPORT BAYAN MUNA

Scientists group say people has to be first in science and technology

Since AGHAM’s founding in 1999, we have upheld that science and technology development cannot be divorced from the overall people’s development. In our long involvement in political affairs in both the national and international arenas, the partylist group Bayan Muna has proven firm and consistent with their support for the Science and Technology Agenda formulated in 2004 along with the agenda of other sectors of Philippine society.

With less than 100 days left before the May 2010 elections, the implementation of the automated election system or AES of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) continues to tread in dangerous waters. Volunteers from the Computer Professionals Union (CPU) witnessed the field test of the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) in Pateros and Taguig on January 29. We are sharing the following excerpts from the CPU volunteers’ report.

Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has been handed a job in the United Kingdom to make public data truly public: by putting it in the Internet. This move is similar to the US government’s decision last December 8 to make “high value, machine readable datasets” generated by the federal government available to the general public. Data catalogs, geographical data and the tools to read it are downloadable in their respective sites with free access for private or commercial reuse.

Last Monday, the College of Science and the School of Economics of the University of the Philippines held a cross-disciplinary symposium titled “Darwin’s Impact on Science and Society” to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s ground breaking and world shaking book On the Origin of Species.