CHAPTER 2

REVIEW OF THE RELATED LITERATURE AND STUDIES

This chapter presents the related literature and studies after the thorough and in-depth search done by the researchers. This will also present the synthesis of the art, theoretical and conceptual framework to fully understand the research to be done and lastly the definition of terms for better comprehension of the study.
Related Literature
All computer scientists who have done work in or are interested in electronic voting seem to agree that online voting does not meet the requirements for public elections and that the current widely-deployed voting systems need improvement.
Voting on the Internet has disadvantages based on the areas of secrecy and protection against coercion and/or vote selling. It's such a truly bad idea that there seems to be no credible academic effort to deploy it at all. The Kenyan General elections of 2007 brought national attention to problems with current methods of casting and counting votes in public elections. Most people believe that the current system should be changed; there is much disagreement on how such changes should be made.c really can't trust any code which we did not create ourselves. Therefore, they tend to be extremely suspicious of proprietary voting machines and their makers who insist that we should “just trust [them].”
Neumann gives a list of suggestions for "generic voting criteria" which suggests that a voting system should be so hard to tamper with and so resistant to failure that no commercial system is likely to ever meet the requirements, and developing a suitable custom system would be extremely difficult and prohibitively expensive.
A voting machine must produce human-readable hardcopy paper results, which can be verified by the voter before the vote is cast, and manually recounted later if necessary.
David Chaum presents a very interesting scheme, whereby voters could get receipts for their votes. This receipt would allow them to know if their votes were included in the final tally or not, and to prove that they voted without revealing any information about how they voted. The security of this scheme depends on visual cryptography developed by Naor and Shamir, and on voters randomly choosing one of two pieces of paper. Mercuri and Neumann advocate the use of this technique in electronic voting systems.

Foreign Studies
In the book “Point, Click, and Vote” Date Published: 11/30/2010 Author(s): Thad E. Hall and R. Michael Alvarez In Point, Click, and Vote, voting experts Michael Alvarez and Thad Hall make a strong case for greater experimentation with Internet voting.

In their words, "There is no way to know whether any argument regarding Internet voting is accurate unless real Internet voting systems are tested, and they should be tested in small-scale, scientific trials so that their successes and failures can be evaluated." In other words, you never know until you try, and it's time to try harder.
The authors offer a realistic plan for putting pilot remote Internet voting programs into effect nationwide. Such programs would allow U.S. voters in selected areas to cast their ballots over any Internet connection; they would not even need to leave home. If these pilot programs are successful, the next step is to consider how they might be implemented on a larger scale in future elections.
The book “Electronic Elections” Date Published: 11/30/2010 Author(s): Thad E. Hall and R. Michael Alvarez. Elections by nature are fraught with risk. Michael Alvarez and Thad Hall fully examine the range of past methods and the new technologies that have been created to try to minimize risk and accurately reflect the will of voters. Drawing upon a wealth of new data on how different kinds of electronic voting machines have performed in recent elections nationwide, they evaluate the security issues that have been the subject of so much media attention, and examine the impacts the new computer-based solutions is having on voter participation. Alvarez and Hall explain why the benefits of e-voting can outweigh the challenges, and they argue that media coverage of the new technologies has emphasized their problems while virtually ignoring their enormous potential for empowering more

citizens to vote. The authors also offer ways to improve voting technologies and to develop more effective means of implementing and evaluating these systems.
Electronic Elections makes a case for how e-voting can work in the United States, showing why making it work right is essential to the future vibrancy of the democratic process.
In Journal Article “Voting Made Safe and Easy: The Impact of Evoting on Citizen Perceptions” by Julia Pomares and Marcelo Leiras (2013). Voting technologies frame the voting experience. Different ways of presenting information to voters, registering voter choices and counting ballots may change the voting experience and cause individuals to re-evaluate the legitimacy of the electoral process. Yet few field experiments have evaluated how voting technologies affect the voting experience. This article uses unique data from a recent e-voting field experiment in Salta, Argentina to study these questions. It employs propensity-score matching methods to measure the causal effect of

replacing traditional voting technology with e-voting on the voting experience. The study’s main finding is that while e-voters perceive the new technology as easier to use and more likely to register votes as intended—and support replacing traditional voting technologies with e-voting—the new technologies also raise some concerns about ballot secrecy.

Local Studies
Sheila Mañalac on her article “Automated voting: A world perspective”
Publish May 11, 2013 10:24 pm. Some countries that had used an automated election system similar to the one that the Commission on Elections bought from Smartmatic have reverted back to manual tallying and counting of votes.
Among these countries are Germany, Switzerland and Ireland.
In 2009, Germany’s Federal Supreme Court (SC) ruled against the automated election system because the use of electronic voting machines is contrary to the democratic and public character that elections must have.
The German Supreme Court also noted the electronic system’s flaws similar to those that Filipino experts have been warning the Comelec and the public about.
The biggest complaint against electronic ballot casting, reading and counting systems is their lack of transparency.
Nobody sees how the machines are reading each ballot. Then the machines report results that no one can verify.
Like the PCOS machines bought by the Philippine government, the machines in Germany did not print our receipts containing what the voter wrote down on his or her ballot.

Experts from CenPEG, AEStch and other institutions have been repeating that the problem in Philippine elections is not in the manual voting and the counting and tabulation that the Comelec officials, representatives of all parties, people from accredited watchdogs and the media can witness on blackboards or whiteboards.
The cheating is in the transmission of results and the fraudulent canvass. With the midterm election tomorrow only hours away, the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) remain questionable to critics and election watchdogs.
Problems of the legality of using these machines as well as the accuracy and the possibility of “wholesale cheating” are just some issues raised by groups such as Automatic Election System (AES) Watch.

The practice of “electronic voting system” or facilitating the elections using machines to read and count votes was used only once before in the 2010 election.
While many countries have efficiently implemented this method, the Philippine voting system still seems a little shaky getting a low score of 8.33 in the “electoral process and pluralism” category of the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), an independent research and analysis branch of the Economist magazine based in London. India, which like us is called a “flawed democracy,” as rated by the EIU, uses electronic voting. They have an electorate of 714 million yet their automated voting system is trusted, although results would come out longer than the “two-day” promise of the Commission on Elections (Comelec).

Unlike the system sold by Smartmatic to the Comelec however, the various US systems are more transparent and leave a paper trail and means of verification. The vision of an untainted election cost the Filipinos $160 million in investment. Commission on Elections Chairman Sixto Brillantes Jr. claims that his agency is “99.9999999 percent ready, just like the PCOS machines, they are not 100 percent accurate,” but close to it nonetheless.

By Xianne Archangel, GMA News September 17, 2014 1:34pm “Congress pressed for law on online voting for overseas Pinoys”

The Commission of Elections (Comelec) on Wednesday urged lawmakers to pass a law allowing Filipino voters abroad to cast their ballots online in order to encourage them to participate in the 2016 local and national elections.
Comelec chairman Sixto Brillantes Jr. said the poll body will need Congress’ approval to implement an online voting system since Republic Act No. 10590 or the Overseas Absentee Voting Act of 2013 only allows Filipino voters abroad to cast their votes either through mail or at the Philippine embassy or consulate. “We’re proposing [voting through] e-mail or the Internet… but this will require the approval of Congress. The system now is you have to go to the consulate or the embassy kaya kakakunti ang bumoboto,” he said.
Comelec is also studying the possibility of coming up with a resolution allowing online voting for overseas Filipino workers but Brillantes said he is worried this might be questioned. OFWs may be able to vote online or via e-mail in the May 2016 polls if Congress passes a law allowing voting via the Internet by the middle of 2015, Brillantes said.In particular, Comelec is eyeing the implementation of online voting in key areas abroad with a large Filipino population such as Saudi

Arabia and other countries in the Middle East. “Our information campaign is not the problem. Our problem is not increasing the number of registered voters but increasing [the number] of those who will vote, kasi kung umabot sa 2 million [ang nag-register] tapos 200,000 lang ang boboto, bababa na naman ang percentage,” he said. Based on government records, there are 737,759 registered overseas voters worldwide, excluding the 238,557 voters who were supposed to be delisted for failing to vote during the 2007 and 2010 elections.
They were eventually reinstated by the poll body. Latest data from the Department of Foreign Affairs show there are 102,817 new overseas Filipino workers who have registered for the 2016 polls. Of these, 43 percent or 44,693 are from the Middle East and Africa. The DFA and the Comelec earlier said they want to double the number of overseas voters for the 2016 polls