QC village to pilot test automated voting
Quezon City's Barangay Pasong Tamo in the 6th District will be the only barangay that will vote their future officials through automation this coming Barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan Elections.
Daily TribuneQuezon City's Barangay Pasong Tamo in the 6th District will be the only barangay that will vote their future officials through automation this coming Barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan Elections.
This comes as the Commission on Elections will be holding a pilot test of its automated election system in three barangays — one in Quezon City and two in the province of Cavite for the October 2023 BSKE.
Barangay Pasong Tamo was chosen to be one of the pilot areas.
Quezon City Sixth District Representative Marivic Co-Pilar said that though the move was an initiative of the Comelec, she and other lawmakers "would see if automated voting is really necessary for the holding of every BSKE polls in the future," after testing it in three pilot areas in the country.
The Comelec has already completed the printing of official ballots for the pilot automated BSKE and Barangay Pasong Tamo will have 60,766 official ballots, equivalent to the numbers of voters in the village.
The other two barangays, Barangay Paliparan III and Barangay Zone II in Dasmariñas City, Cavite, will have 51,435 and 1,475 official ballots for it's registered voters, respectively.
Co-Pilar said the choice of participating barangays in the pilot testing is an offshoot of the direct outcome of last Regular Hearing of the House of Representatives Committee on Suffrage and Electoral Reforms.
She added that the decision was reached upon mutual consultation and mutual agreement between the House and the Comelec.
Automated voting is expected to speed up the election process, with ballots being cast between 6:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. and the results immediately available.
Manual elections in other barangays, on the other hand, will need to have finished voting by 6 p.m., but the counting will only be concluded between 9 p.m. to 10 p.m.
A dry run will be conducted in the three barangays before the pilot testing.
The three barangays have nearly 112,000 registered voters — 84,100 regular and 27,817 youth voters — with 227 clustered precincts.
The results of the pilot test will be used to determine whether or not automated voting will be implemented nationwide in future BSKE polls.