MANILA: A new online voting method designed to increase voter participation in the Philippines ‘ millions of foreign workers ahead of Monday’s midterm elections has been marred by uncertainty and apathy.
In the culture dominated by a terrible conflict between President Ferdinand Marcos and his charged vice chairman Sara Duterte, countless foreign Filipino laborers, or OFWs, have now cast their ballots.
Official turnout data is not yet made publicly available, but polls from the Commission on Elections ( Comelec) indicate that at least 134, 000 of the 1.22 million registered foreign voters have opted into the new online system, which launched on April 13th.
However, Jun Burlasa III, a Filipino who works in Singapore, claims he will never cast a ballot again if he must do so online.
The 50-year-old, who described the new system as” complicated and suspicious,” told AFP this year,” I’d rather do manual.”
A online QR code that is generated after voting that directs users to a webpage that asks them to confirm their vote has been submitted correctly is in issue. A tangle of laptop code and prospect names can be found below that.
Burlasa claimed that many of the labels on display were individuals for whom he had not cast a ballot.
Similar stories about the frightful website have spread across social media, including Facebook articles that have reaches out to thousands.
Eman Villanueva, a Hong Kong-based campaigner for the immigrant rights organization BAYAN, claimed he was uncertain whether his ballot had been effectively weighed.
There is no way for the citizens to determine whether the votes cast actually reflect our decisions, he said.
In earlier outside elections, voters had the option to change the names they had chosen after the truth, but Comelec claimed that the QR code was not intended to do that.
The commission stated that the landing page’s inclusion was solely intended to check a ballot’s receipt, adding that each election candidate’s name should be listed on the page.
According to Ian Geonanga, Comelec’s chairman of abroad voting,” we are certainly considering the comments and studying how to include them in upcoming elections.”
Election whistleblowers, however, claim that the committee misapplied the new program and that confusion could lead to disenfranchising voters.
Ona Caritos, executive director of the nonprofit Legal Network for Truthful Elections ( Lente ), said,” It’s a natural reaction of people that if you’re not familiar with the system, you won’t trust it in the first place.”
– ChatGPT, disinfo and 2028-
A Philippines-based expert named Jaydee San Juan quizzes ChatGPT about the brands that appear on the ballot confirmation page after watching a movie on April 14 for 1.5 million people.
The AI bot responded,” It’s very likely showing the candidates who were chosen/voted for using that vote ID.”
But, Comelec, according to Geonanga, received the same response when conducting the ChatGPT trial on his own.
While the election agency’s efforts to suppress concerns about the new program have been misrepresented in order to spread more false information,
A picture that was edited to make it seem Geonanga was saying online votes were “designed” to setup the election’s results was just debunked by AFP fact-checkers.
Election whistleblowers and migratory advocacy groups are skeptical that the switch to online voting does increase participation as intended as a result of the fiasco.
Even a minor change to the ballot’s pattern, according to Danilo Arao, the chairman of voting guardian Kontra Daya, may have stoked concerns that it might guide to “widespread disenfranchisement.
Losing faith in the online voting system, according to Lente’s Caritos, may affect OFWs ‘ ability to participate in the presidential election of 2028.
We don’t want that since, she said,” the legitimacy of the government would be compromised if the election results were not trusted by our citizens.” It has a “domino effect.”
pr-jan/cwl/df/dhw