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Background of The Study

The document discusses issues with past paper-based voting systems in the Philippines, which were prone to corruption and electoral fraud. A fingerprint-based voting system using Arduino is proposed as an alternative to address problems like invalid votes, long polling times and vote counting. However, accurate vote counting was still an issue in past elections. The 1949 elections in particular saw widespread fraud, with some areas reporting more votes than registered voters. Reforms were initiated after 1951 to address fraud concerns, but the Comelec became partisan under the Marcos dictatorship. The Philippines only moved to a less vulnerable automated election system in 2007.

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Kathleen Cornejo
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81 views3 pages

Background of The Study

The document discusses issues with past paper-based voting systems in the Philippines, which were prone to corruption and electoral fraud. A fingerprint-based voting system using Arduino is proposed as an alternative to address problems like invalid votes, long polling times and vote counting. However, accurate vote counting was still an issue in past elections. The 1949 elections in particular saw widespread fraud, with some areas reporting more votes than registered voters. Reforms were initiated after 1951 to address fraud concerns, but the Comelec became partisan under the Marcos dictatorship. The Philippines only moved to a less vulnerable automated election system in 2007.

Uploaded by

Kathleen Cornejo
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Background of the study:

Voting requires a lot of accuracy and precision. One wrong vote is very essential for the

future of a beloved country. Paper based voting system is with disabilities and

vulnerable to corruption and can be found in the elections.

Fingerprint based voting system is implemented using the Arduino. The systems read the

data from the fingerprint module then verify the data and take the next action. The

advantages of fingerprint based voting system is it provides chance to avoid invalid

votes, it reduces the polling time, it reduces the staff of voting center, it provides easy

and accurate counting without any troubles, it provides voting preventive measures.

Voting can be a trouble but counting the number of votes is the headache and the

main source of cheating in the elections. It can reach several days to accomplish

accumulating all the votes from all over the country.

The 1949 elections, for example, was labelled as the worst elections held in the

Philippines due to mass electoral fraud, which mostly occurred in Lanao and Negros

provinces. Most of the votes turned out in favor of candidates of the then ruling Liberal

Party. In a journal article published March 1954, Ohio University professor emeritus

Willard Elsbree recalled how a Commission on Elections (Comelec) official declared

that “there is no more democracy in the Philippines” during the 1949 election season.

“Fraud and violence were rife. On election day, members of the constabulary and

‘good squads’ roamed the streets to intimidate supporters of the opposition party.

Registration lists were padded to almost comic proportions. It was said that ‘the birds,

the bees and the flowers’ voted in some districts where the number of votes nearly

equaled the total population,” Elsbree wrote.


An amendment on Section 76, Republic Act 180 or the Revised Election Code, passed

on June 1947, gave way to this massive electoral fraud as it denied the Comelec

authority in the appointment of the board of election inspectors (BOI). Following

pressure from poll watchdog National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel)

prior to the 1951 elections, the Comelec initiated reforms to address concerns on

electoral fraud. Namfrel was founded that year to stand as a non-partisan election

monitoring group to prevent election fraud and has since done this task until the 2016

elections. One of the revisions that the Comelec made was to require that the BOI be

composed of one representative each from the majority and minority parties and an

independent appointee. Note that in the 1949 polls, the election inspectors were

dominated by the majority party. De La Salle University professor Cleo Calimbahin, an

expert on electoral reform, wrote in an article titled “Capacity and compromise:

COMELEC, NAMFREL and election fraud” that the poll body made changes in the

system such as giving itself the authority to assign polling precincts, prepare voters’ list

and handle ballot management. In an attempt to prevent so-called flying voters, the

Comelec also imposed a residency requirement for voters. By 1986, the Comelec would

be known as “highly partisan” and “biased” under the Marcos dictatorship. Namfrel

played a key role in the elections that year by providing an alternative quick count.

“Consistently used as an instrument for vote manipulation during the pre-martial law

period, the Comelec did not initiate reforms after 1969 as Marcos had the commission a

part of his machinery and extended patronage both to the commissioners and the

larger Comelec bureaucracy,” Calimbahin wrote. Until 2007, the Philippines used the
manual election system, which was noticeably vulnerable as it was hard to pinpoint

whether there was human error or a deliberate attempt to manipulate results.

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