Philippines says vote to have problems, won't fail
A Board of Elections Inspector (BEI) official shows poll watchers a sample ballot during testing of the automated voting machines inside a school in Manila May 6, 2010. Philippine voters will choose a president, vice president and nearly 300 lawmakers in the two-chamber Congress and more than 17,600 local government officials in the first nationwide automated polls on May 10. Politicians and investors are nervous about the automated voting machines, which have not been tested in the country, and those concerns increased after a recall of more than 76,000 memory chips this week after a fault was detected. REUTERS
Published: May 6, 2010 16:13 Updated: May 6, 2010 16:13
MANILA: The Philippines' automated voting system could throw up some problems in next week's election, but the last-minute replacement of faulty technology should prevent an outright failure, the election commission said on Thursday.
Sen. Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino has built a double-digit lead in opinion polls over Sen. Manuel Villar, former President Joseph Estrada and six other candidates in the contest for the presidency of the Asian nation of more than 90 million people.
Voting for the presidency and nearly 18,000 local and national positions is going ahead on May 10 after the election commission (Comelec) decided it could replace more than 76,000 memory chips in vote-counting machines in less than a week.
"There will still be problems admittedly, but what's important is that these problems will have to be solved," Comelec Commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal told foreign correspondents, adding Comelec had a plan to deal with technical and logistics issues.
"There'll be always variables. There are things that you never expect that can happen. Failure of machines is not a failure of elections."
Jose Melo, a retired Supreme Court justice who heads Comelec, said about 95 percent of the memory cards would be delivered and installed before the vote, but there would be delays in counting about 3.3 million votes in remote and violence-prone southern areas.
"Elections will still go through at all levels in all polling precincts," Melo told reporters, adding the last of the memory cards would probably arrive on Monday or Tuesday, too late to install and test before voting.
Instead, completed ballots would remain in ballot boxes until the new cards were installed in the voting machines. Then election officials would process the ballot papers, Melo said.
Nine provinces, including all in the Muslim autonomous region on Mindanao, will be affected, raising concerns among some observers due to past instances of election fraud in these areas.
The recall, coming at the same time as Greece's woes have hit global markets, has led investors to reassess recent optimism concerning the Philippines, which last month sent shares to their highest levels since early 2008 and took the peso to 20-month highs.
Those gains had been driven by foreign buying of stocks after a run of favorable data and a view that either Aquino or Villar, both seen as economic centrists, would win the vote.
"It's a double whammy," said Jose Vistan, research director of AB Capital Securities. "It is affecting us in a negative way. Sentiments, which have been positive the past few months, have reversed somewhat."
The stock market fell 0.3 percent to 3,167.83 on Thursday, extending Wednesday's 3.5 percent drop, and the peso has fallen 2 percent over the past three days to its weakest since late March.
"If things turn ugly, the markets can go further down," Vistan said, estimating a disputed outcome could knock the stock market toward 2,900 points and push bond yields up.
Sovereign 5-year credit default swaps spreads, a measure of perceived risk, have widened to two-month highs over 180 points this week from near 150 in late April, although they remain below February's peak of more than 210 points and the move is consistent with a shift in Indonesian spreads.
The new automated system has long raised fears of fraud and a failed vote, and this week's recall prompted the government to propose delaying the polls by two weeks.
"If the public perceives the election process as compromised in a non-trivial way, then speculation will turn to conspiracy theories of the elections being canceled or nullified - arguably the worst outcome for the Philippines," Roberto Herrera-Lim, Eurasia Group's director for Asia, said in a report.
However, he said these risks were mitigated by Aquino's strong lead - 19 points in a mid-April survey by Pulse Asia - and that the technical glitch only affected local positions, not the counting of votes for national positions.
Cesar Flores, president for Asia for Smartmatic, the supplier of vote-counting machines for Monday's polls, said the new and reconfigured memory cards would be ready by Friday for delivery over the weekend.
"There is no reason to stop the elections and we're 100 percent confident that we can do this," Flores said, adding 30,000 cards, including 12,000 taken from machines, had already been reconfigured.
"It's a human error. We're not denying it, but it is being resolved," Flores said. "It's a stupid mistake with huge consequences."
