COMELEC-ICT COOPERATION
A PUBLIC-PRIVATE COOPERATION PARADIGM
FOR THE 2004 ELECTIONS


By: RESURRECCION Z. BORRA, Commissioner, Commission on Elections

Ladies and Gentlemen: Good Afternoon.

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Although it gives me great pleasure to be addressing such a distinguished assemblage of the nation’s best and brightest in the field of Information and Communication Technology, I must admit that I am a bit envious of you. Before all of us who find ourselves living in this day and age, lies the opportunity to reshape the world we live in. We are all inheritors of the chance to learn more, achieve more, create more. And yet, not all of us are blessed with the skills needed to transform that opportunity into tangible reality.

The promise of the tomorrows yet to come is written in binary. You who speak that language are the key masters. The rest of us simply pass through the doors that you open. You will learn, and we will learn from you. You will achieve, and we will enjoy the benefits of your achievements. You will create, and we will marvel. Your intelligence, enthusiasm, and dedication will fuel the country’s continuing drive into the digital 21st century, and I am privileged to be in your company today.

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Even at this stage of its development - and I am sure you will agree that there is more development yet to come - ICT already leaves me breathless. As a private individual, I am constantly amazed at the things that are now possible. A cellular phone, smaller than my hand and yet able to carry voice and image to a person half way around the world; a flash drive, no heavier than a pen, yet able to store the collected works of Shakespeare; and children more adept at computers than I ever will be - indeed, this is the age of the casually miraculous.

As a government official, I watch the development of ICT and track its growing pervasiveness and effectivity. I recognize that its strength lies in its ability to increase the capacity of governments to deal with economic and social challenges. Most importantly, being a COMELEC Commissioner, I saw that ICT promised more efficient and transparent administration at lower cost, broader public participation, and improved public access to government services and greater participation in public decisions. As it turns out, these are the very same imperatives that drove me to devote all my efforts at ensuring the automation of the 2004 elections.

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The manual system of conducting elections is hopelessly archaic. Republic Act 8436 recognized this and laid down the mandate for automated elections. As can be expected, the first attempts of COMELEC to live up to this mandate were patently tentative. We were entering new territory, after all. However, after two partially automated elections - both in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao - I personally felt that the COMELEC was ready to undertake the greater challenge of full automation.

2001, however, was a heartbreaker. We retrogressed and ended up with a totally manual count. Although this dismayed me, it also strengthened my resolve to see Republic Act 8436 fully implemented by 2004. To do this, I knew I had first to grapple with many issues, and in so doing chart a course towards the true modernization of the elections.

First, the issue of efficiency and transparency. The conduct of elections in the Philippines has always been mired in inefficiency perpetuated by a lack of transparency. Taking my cue from the ICT industry, where efficiency and transparency are discrete organizational goals in and of themselves, I envisioned a system that would eliminate inefficiency and promote transparency in the implementation of the mandate of RA 8436.

The first step, obviously, was to ensure that the process of introducing new technology into existing archaic systems was understood fully and correctly. This meant that the existing process had to be examined by outside experts who, while they did not all have election administration experience per se, nevertheless understood the various complexities of large-scale operations.

Fortunately, former COMELEC Chairman Alfredo L. Benipayo had already started on this road when he encouraged the budding partnership between the COMELEC and certain members of the private sector, who came from such organizations as PCS and Namfrel among others.

I followed Mr. Benipayo’s lead and immediately pledged my commitment to keep the lines of communication between COMELEC and the private sector open. As a result, more and more private organizations were drafted into the cooperative scheme that was slowly emerging. The participation of these organizations allowed us to bring in certain core competencies that completed those of the COMELEC, such as operations planning, software development, and risk management.

By bringing the right tools to bear on the task at hand, it became clear to me that efficiency would no longer be just an ideal. And because we were encouraging more extensive involvement of the private sector, transparency became a specific goal for everyone involved in the process on the COMELEC side.

When we had the core group of COMELEC-private sector experts, we turned our attention to broadening public participation in the process. Through the tireless efforts of the members of our core group, we brought in representatives of various public sector organizations and corporations, many of which belonged to the ICT industry, including PCS, and ISSSP. These individuals, armed with their ICT knowledge, experience, and skills proved instrumental in finalizing the draft request for proposal that set out the specifications for the counting machines that we would need in order to comply with RA 8436.

It is significant to note that the detailed RFP for the Automation Project was a novelty, not just because it was formulated by a COMELEC-private sector tandem, but also because it was a significant departure from the fairly non-specific RFP’s of COMELEC’s previous attempts at modernization - the Voter’s Registration and Identification System project and the Automated Counting and Canvassing Of Results project, or ACCORS.

The RFP’s for these two projects were done in such broad strokes that we created a vendor’s market where the COMELEC - not having done its homework - was obliged to take the vendor’s word as to what constituted the project’s essential elements, and what did not. I believe that this led to proposals that were crafted more for buck than bang. With the new detailed RFP, on the other hand, the COMELEC has managed to insist on getting the most bang out its buck.

The emergence of the COMELEC-private sector team up also enabled the COMELEC to take the necessary steps towards addressing two other major concerns: greater public access to government services, and greater participation in public decisions.

It must be remembered that the private sector half of this tandem did not only carry with them their ICT knowledge and skills. They were also very effective advocates for the improvement of certain procedures that the COMELEC had been using out of habit. For instance, the COMELEC-private sector team is proposing certain procedural changes aimed at streamlining voting center procedures. In a situation akin to a denial of service attack on the Internet, confusion in precincts on voting day effectively reduces the number of people that can be served by the Boards of Election Inspectors. Should these proposals be approved by the COMELEC en banc, they will go a long way towards ensuring easier public access, fewer instances of voter disenfranchisement, and more orderly elections come 2004. Greater public access, in turn, translates to greater participation in public decisions through the ballot.

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I must admit that in my experience - gained from more than 40 years in the COMELEC - the degree of private sector involvement in the planning and implementation of the Commission’s Automated Counting and Canvassing Project is unprecedented. While it is true that we have attempted automation before, the kind and extent of private sector participation we are seeing now simply did not occur before.

While this fact gives me great confidence in the outcome of our landmark undertaking, I am not naïve enough to say that we have created for ourselves a perfect model for what I have come to call public-private cooperation. Indeed, as we continue our efforts towards ensuring the successful automation of the 2004 elections, we find ourselves learning more and more about the dynamics and the pitfalls of public-private interaction. Lessons that I also want to share with you today.

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Allow me, first of all, to define my idea of what Public-Private Cooperation, or PPC, is. PPC - as I conceive it and as it evolved in our prosecution of the Automation Project - is an arrangement between a public agency and private individuals and groups, through which the core competencies of each both the public and private sectors, are brought together synergistically, for the purpose of planning and implementing the introduction of modern technology into existing systems and processes, with the end in view of delivering better and modernized service to the general public.

Obviously, there can be no set rules or formulas for ensuring successful PPC, since the circumstances of each modernization opportunity vary. However, there are certain key concerns which, addressed properly, can make the PPC process flow smoother and more efficiently.

First, there must be a strong commitment from the top. The most senior officials of the public agency must be willing to actively support the cooperative effort. In many cases, the differences in the organizational cultures of the public and private sector give rise to frustrating impasses. The private sector, for instance, typically adopts a horizontal - or nearly horizontal - management structure where upper management sets the priorities and leaves implementation to lower level managers. This arrangement enables front-line executives to make key decisions quickly, eliminating the need to seek approval from the top, thereby allowing the implementers to adhere religiously to project timetables.

In government, however, the decision making power is sometimes so centralized that a busted light bulb cannot even be replaced without a board resolution. This red tape makes timetables recommendatory instead of mandatory, the way it ought to be. As a consequence, many project deadlines are missed and opportunities lost.

In a successful PPC, the senior officials of the public agency can easily bridge this divide by committing themselves to prioritizing project business and ensuring that all necessary approvals are given, and given on time. Without this commitment to simplify and minimize bureaucratic procedures, the project will suffer slippage after slippage until its completion is finally rendered impossible.

Second, once the PPC has been established, the public sector must remain actively participative in the project. We must keep in mind that static inertia is very strong in government. Projects, once begun, often start losing momentum very early. In part, this can be blamed upon slow approval processes that sap the project’s vitality. In many instances, the lack of resources - and the inadequacy of upper management efforts to provide those resources - brings about the loss of enthusiasm for the project. Although I do not believe that this phenomenon is endemic to the Philippines, we have seen it often enough that we have found a way to express it succinctly. We call it ningas cogon.

To combat this insidious tendency, the private sector participant must be willing to engage in on going monitoring of project progression from beginning to end. This will not only ensure success, but also operate as a kind of early warning device.

Many projects come to a crashing halt, close to the finish line, because of some incongruous factor that cropped up earlier in the implementation process, but was not given the appropriate attention. The same thing happened to the latest space shuttle tragedy. If NASA engineers had looked more closely at the damage caused by the clumps of foam that impacted on the shuttle’s heat shield, lives could have been saved. Similarly, anything out of the ordinary that crops up during the implementation of the project must be defined, assessed, recorded, and classified, and the appropriate action immediately taken. At the very least, warning flags can be put up so that if later events prove earlier assessments wrong, the problem can more easily be traced and rectified.

Third, there must always be a well thought-out plan of action. The respective duties and responsibilities of each participant in the PPC must be laid out clearly and comprehensively. The interconnections and dependencies between various elements of the project must also be made explicit.

Thus, an ideal plan would include details of how specific PPC goals are to be achieved, and by whom. Such a plan must also indicate the coordination mechanisms that will govern the relationship of the private sector participants with their public sector counterparts, as well as the procedures for securing upper management approval.

Without this, the various members of the PPC will often be left groping in the dark, wondering who to talk to, where to go, and what to do next. While it is true that these concerns can be addressed by the lead official on the public sector side of the PPC, it would be highly inefficient if he had to keep on fielding questions, the answers to which could have easily been foreseen and recorded for everyone’s guidance.

And fourth, there must be adequate communications with the stakeholders. The PPC cannot, and should not, operate in a vacuum. Affected employees in the respective organizations of the participants in the PPC, those portions of the public who will benefit or will be prejudiced by the project, the press, and relevant interest groups and NGOs will all have their own opinions. Frequently, these opinions will be misconceptions, a large proportion of which may well turn out to be very significant to the success of the project. Here in the Philippines, and especially with regard to the contentious topic of elections and election modernization, this is particularly true of the press.

As we all know, our country is blessed with the freest press in Asia. While this may be a signal achievement for our democracy, it can frequently be a very real risk to the success of a project. Many of our reporters shoot - or write - from the hip. As a result, poorly informed opinions slant news reports, which are then harped upon by columnists and opinion writers who are just as poorly informed.

Thus, it is essential to communicate openly and candidly with these stakeholders to minimize potential resistance to the goals of the PPC. It must also be ensured that the information which emanates from the PPC and finds its way to the stakeholders be accurate.

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We, in the COMELEC-private sector tandem learned some of these lessons the hard way. But at least now, we are better prepared for the coming tasks that still need to be accomplished. And so we marshal on.

The initial focus of our PPC was the conceptualization and development of an automated system that would be responsive to the mandate of the law. Now that we have done that and are merely awaiting the green light from the COMELEC en banc, we must turn our attention to the other pressing need that faces the COMELEC modernization effort: Public acceptance.

And if the participation of the ICT industry was pivotal before, it is absolutely essential now.

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While mass media - print, radio, and television - still dominates in terms of reach and penetration, ICT based information dissemination is not far behind. In fact, I would argue that, where cellular telephony is concerned, ICT has got mass media beat by a mile. People in the far provinces who may not have access to TV programming from Manila, now routinely communicate with people from all over the archipelago with cellular telephones and SMS. We are, in fact, the texting capital of the world, are we not? The power of SMS is beyond question. We must now put that power to the service of the nation.

The Internet too, is becoming an increasingly integral part of life. E-mail has become one of the most preferred long-distance communication modalities. And local websites are now getting more and more traffic as more and more individuals are getting wired. Again, the power of the Internet is beyond question. And we must now put that power to the service of the nation.

Our country is about to embark upon an electoral exercise that will have far-reaching consequences for each and every one of us. We are also going to use new technology that represents a quantum shift in the voting paradigm of a vast majority of Filipinos. The confluence of these two circumstances creates a huge potential for failure and ensures that that failure - if we let it happen - will be catastrophic.

However, if we can educate the voting public on the new automated system, we cut down the probability of failure significantly. At the same time, if can make the public appreciate the ramifications of the choices they will make in 2004, we make a significant contribution to the future of our Republic.

This, then, is my challenge to the women and men of the ICT industry: Can the nation count on you? Will you join hands with the COMELEC in this Herculean task, along the lines of public-private cooperation as I outlined it? Can we look forward to clean, honest, orderly, and credible elections in 2004? The looks on your faces tell me that the answers are yes, YES, and YES!!!

Failure is not an option, success is our direction!!!