It's disappointing how the election automation difficulties in 2022 caused so much avoidable inconvenience to voters and stress to teachers and election officers on the ground. And there is nothing to blame but the ineptitude of the Commission on Elections (COMELEC).

Recall: in the 2010 elections the Vote Counting Machines (VCM) were leased from the supplier Smartmatic. Thus it was for that company to ensure that the VCMs were running smoothly – hardware and software. That meant that they were maintained and deployed properly.

After that the late COMELEC chairman Sixto Brillantes led the move to purchase the machines, meaning the storage, maintenance and upgrading would be on the dime and effort of the COMELEC itself. They probably thought that they were saving money by outright buying the machines when, in truth, they would bear all the upkeep costs, not to mention the costs of depreciation, obsolescence and ultimately the credibility and image of the commission and the elections should they fail.

And that's exactly what happened in 2022. If our election automation machines were leased we would have had the flexibility to change suppliers anytime – for each election period. The net result would have been the best and most reliable technology on any elections.

Instead we had VCMs that were being used in every election since 2010 handled and maintained by the COMELEC. They cannot blame anybody but themselves for it. Sure, Smartmatic is still the supplier and, I guess, the go to people for technical matters. But they would not be as invested in what they're doing because it's COMELEC's ballgame, not theirs.

The VCMs are basically document scanners. I was part of an IT business supplying high end document scanners for banks and manufacturers in the past, and I know that these have rubber rollers and plastic consumable parts that have to be replaced on a regular basis. Even if the VCMs were in storage for two to three years between elections and not being used, these consumable parts have a tendency to harden, crack, and fail.

The result: ballots jamming when being fed into the machines, as widely experienced in many polling places during the May 9, 2022 election day.

Speaking of jamming ballots, many reports indicated that ballots were being rejected because their size was too big. Didn't they learn their lesson in 2010? When heat and humidity in the overseas voting in Hong Kong caused the ballots to expand by a few microns and rejected by the VCMs?

Delays in the delivery of replacement VCMs also caused voters to wait in line for hours. Why did the standby replacement machines have to come from the main warehouse in Sta. Rosa, Laguna? Why were backup VCMs not pre-positioned in hubs throughout Metro Manila and the various provinces?

Then there's the issue of failed Secure Digital (SD) cards, the replacements of which were also being brought in from Sta. Rosa. Why weren't back up or extra SD cards issued to each precinct?

These technical issues make us doubt if COMELEC even tested the machines at the warehouse before being deployed for the elections. This testing was done with great media fanfare in the past, but hardly a peep this time.

Let's take it to an earlier technology issue. The COMELEC Precinct Finder only became operational a few days before elections. Many voters found themselves disenfranchised by being deactivated in the latest voters' list.

COMELEC changed the rules for the 2022 elections. In the past barangay elections were not considered a national election. One was held in 2018. The national elections were the midterms (Senators, Congressmen, LGUs) in 2019.

The rule is that if a voter did not vote in two consecutive national elections, that voter is deactivated. So many voters who didn't vote in both thought they only missed the 2019 midterms, and thus were surprised they were deactivated. But by that time they found out it was too late to appeal since COMELEC just released the online precinct finder a few days before the elections.

The precinct finder should have been released way before the election registration deadline in October 2021 so that affected voters could remedy their status. But no, COMELEC failed to do so.

I have a good friend whose mother is a COMELEC official in a province adjacent to Metro Manila. Before the end of the registration period she confirmed to my friend that his status according to their records was okay. But lo and behold he was deactivated and only found out when precinct finder came out a few days ago.

Many were also deactivated because of encoding errors because COMELEC totally changed the whole thing after they were hacked. Data encoders were probably in a mad rush to finish their task that there was no more proofing and quality control.

Why did COMELEC change the Precinct Finder in the first place? Because their voters' list got hacked, data stolen. So they killed the old precinct finder – which had been working perfectly for years – and replaced the whole thing instead. Why didn't COMELEC just improve its technology security systems and continue with the old, perfectly running precinct finder? The total change was marred with delays that caused much inconvenience and unjustly disenfranchised so many.

These are just the IT issues that the COMELEC failed to address resulting in the derailment of the credibility gains of election automation since it started in 2010. Let's not even talk about cheating and corruption. Certainly ineptitude will feed the peoples' disgust and distrust.