Comelec Chairman Jose Melo told ABSCBN News that the poll body is “ready for manual elections if poll automation tests fail” — almost as if he expects that very disappointing outcome. He also revealed the key TECHNICAL SPECIFICATION against which all bidding systems will be tested: a required 99.995 percent accuracy rating in reading and counting ballots. How exactly does one perform a Quality Control test to measure such a capability in an automated ballot reading and counting system? And what are the Constitutional implications of a formal Comelec Request for Bid from private companies whose main technical specification contemplates as acceptable the erroneous reading and counting of 5 votes out of every 100,000, or 2000 votes out of the 40 million to be cast next year for President.
Here is the basic scenario. On Election Day 2010, up to 40 million ballots could conceivably be cast for President, Vice President, 12 Senators, Congressman, Party List Representative, and provincial and local government positions. For the sake of simplicity, assume there are twenty-five candidates selected on each ballot so that a possible one billion votes must be read off 40 million ballots and accurately credited to the indicated candidate.
What 99.995 percent accuracy rating really means is that When the thousands of ballot reading and counting machines finish their work on all the ballots that are actually cast on an Election Day in which one billion votes for national and local positions are cast, they will have made ERRORS IN READING AND COUNTING not more than 0.005 percent of the one billion, or not more than 50,000 votes cast for national and local candidates. That is how many votes the 99.995 percent accuarcy rating contemplates as tolerable, spread out over all the thousands of individual positions actually available. For a single position, such as President, the specification contemplates as acceptable the erroneous reading and counting of up to 2,000 votes out of 40 million votes cast.
This appears to be an unavoidable cost of automation because of the statistical nature of error and malfunction in electromechanical devices of all kinds. Of course, it is probably a legal and constitutional fiction, that the manual counting of ballots is 100% accurate., especially where the main technical qualification is handwriting analysis. The Omnibus Election Code condones unreadable or spoilt ballots, but the present specification is being justified by the notion that these errors are small in number and that it is unlikely they would affect the final result of any election. However unlikely, there is now the possibility of some kind of constitutional crisis should it ever occur that the winning margin be comparable to the margin of error in some future very close election. For the Constitution even contemplates the notion of a tie that would be broken by Congress. But does such a provision apply to a “statistical dead heat” that could occur?
Although Comelec has not yet released the formal Bid Specs or the $20,000 Bid Documents it is widely anticipated that among the leading bidders will be systems offering Optical Mark Readers. Public testing of these machines has been promised and much speculation is being ventilated about the security of these systems. There is also the question of how to proof-test a given machine or set of machines as being capable of 99.995% accurate reading of the votes on a ballot. I sure hope the Bid Specs give not just the required level of accuracy but also the statistical confidence interval–otherwise it could be a meaningless spec!
But here is something quite definite for those with a good background in Statistics and especially those with Quality Control backgrounds. If I gave you 100,000 machines and told you to prove that they have 99.995% accuracy how would you go about testing them rigorously to do that? Would you test them all? Would you do a sampling test? How many ballots would you test? How many votes? You have less than a year!
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i have a technical question on this calculation:
so, 99.995% of ballots will have zero errors? so 0.005% will have:
1) 1 error?
2) all errors?
3) somewhere in between?
if its 1 error only, then we also need to factor in in which position the error occurs.
if there are (hypothetical) 2 positions, then the probablity of the error landing in position 1 (call it president) will be 1/2 of .005%, assuming independent errors…
is this right?
I think to be fair to all candidates the accuracy rating must apply to individual votes for a given position. So when they test a ballot with say 30 open positions they are really testing the machine’s performance on 30 separate situations, namely each blacked out circle or check mark or however the ballots are read.
this is an important technical question, it would be interesting to know exactly what this standard means.
not to OC about it, if your interpretation is (DJB on March 12th, 2009 4:52 pm), then the text of your blog post is wrong:
instead of :” 99.995 percent accuracy rating in reading and counting ballots”
it should be ” 99.995 percent accuracy rating in reading and counting votes of a particular candidate”
which is why if your orignal formulation is correct, then we need to refine your calculations further…
DJB correctly points out the folly behind such technical specifications. I remember the NCEE exams (early 80′s I think) that used OCR technology, and the whole lot was invalidated for that year. Although I think it is not the .005 margin of error we should be concerned about. They could specify even 99.999 accuracy, but it won’t matter if we will still have something analogous to the province of Maguindanao election returns controversy.
DJB,
Pinning our salvation on the automation? Well, well well… :)
JCC,
Salvation?
Naah! But imagine all the banks were being run manually like they were a hundred years ago. Wouldn’t we automate that for sure? And of course we have.
Same same.
i have no problem with automation Dean.. as someone said, it is a good start… but i hope we get to the finish line, and my finish line is not being able to proclaim the legit leader but one who can inspire us and get us out of the rut we are in. that is very tough finish line. :)
JCC, I hear ya…
More like a distant shore. But row we must! Now, here we have an issue that will force science and technology into the public consciousness.
a good start is to have a legit leader. for to start on a wrong foot is to fall flat on the face and then not reached the finish line.
I believe the 99.555 something accuracy but the problem is the process of collecting honest ballots from educated and uneducated voters. for example, sitio bukidnon have 30,000 voters, 15000 are honest voters and the other half can be paid. the paid other half of 15,000 will be cooked like chicken adobo. the automated machine of course will take it as a legitimate vote.
Now how do COMELEC and its subsidiaries prevent the cooking and overcooking? what are the current steps that will prevent this from happening? have they educated the public on how to use the machine? alam mo na, baka ma intimidate si mang juan? what are the rules and regulations regarding vote buying? what are the penalties? have they educated the people in terms of their voting rights and how their votes affect economic growth of this country?
is the media asking the same questions here?
you see.. a machine is not enough unless the whole package of good governance and its proper policy on election are in place.
From the sound of it, it’s most likely a vendor influenced technical specification rather than something that will guarantee clean and honest elections. Vendor A has equipment X that needs to pass this criteria over and above other vendors. That’s all there is to it.
well well well…salvation through automation :)
JuwanD,
The Wheel was a form of automation, which is really another word for Reading, Writing, and ‘Rithmetic applied to the problems of real life.
What you should really be wellwellwelling about is: “Salvation through God?”
Automation will never stop election cheaters.
They will always find ways to cheat…
Where did you get your statistical figure ?
What good is accuracy if 99.99% of Filipinos are corrupt?
“99.995%” was announced on television by Chairman Melo.