On 13 May, 2013, half way between its last Presidential elections in 2010 and its next in 2016, the Philippines held its midterm elections.

Once again, Smartmatic provided technology and services to make the process of electing over 18,000 officials more transparent, more accurate and more efficient, whilst delivering faster results.

This enormous country desperately needed a better way to vote – and to count votes. In a country where people used to have to wait weeks for election results, they can now find out within hours. Crucial when longer delays lead to greater election violence.

Our solution included over 82,000 voting machines. They were in fact the same machines that Comelec, the country’s electoral council, leased in 2010.

At the time, this election was the largest automated election ever taken by a private company. They worked so well, Comelec purchased them for this election.

Scope

• 164,400 compact flash memory cards for secure election data storage
• 80,916 SAES-1800 precinct counting machines deployed in most of the 7,100 islands comprising the archipelago nation.
• 48,000 modems and 46,000 SIM cards used for direct transmission of election returns
• Over 36,000 schools functioned as voting centres, all pre-screened for quality of network signals, power availability – and other logistical concerns
• 5,853 spare machines for contingencies
• 5,000 mobile BGAN satellite antennas and 680 VSATs to transmit results in polling and totalling centres with little or no cellular coverage
• 1,684 totalling and consolidation servers and printers
• 600 tech support agents located in the National Support Center during election day for monitoring the entire process and for remote support to the technicians in the field
• Two data centres (with redundancy capabilities) to backup results.

Services

Smartmatic supplied integrated technological, logistical and support services, including:

Hardware Acceptance Testing

This involved physically testing specific hardware in the presence of the client – to verify everything worked and met the required specifications.

Technician training

We showed technicians how to operate the voting machines. They also learned how to use the Totalisation and Consolidation system, including its peripherals. At orientation, we also teach technicians contingency protocols, so they know how to respond to unplanned events.

Transmission services

Smartmatic’s Electronic Transmission System (SERT) offered a completely secure and flexible transmission solution. It allowed operators to send election results via a variety of different options: fixed phone line (DSL), cellular phone or modem GPRS/EDGE/3G/4G technologies or BGAN and VSAT satellites.

National Support Centre (NSC)

Our NSC provided remote support to field personnel, in case they were unable to resolve any technical or operational issues themselves. Staff here also monitored the status of deliver and operation of all polling and canvassing centres, including checking technician and supervisor attendance.

Data and tech consultancy services

• Data migration from legacy systems
• Data validation
• On-site election day tech support
• Field monitoring
• Database Management System (DBMS)
• Server hardening
• Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDPS)
• Network Management System (NMS)
• Firewall
• Load balancers
• Results website
• Information security tests
• Lessons learned report
• Technical post-mortem analysis

Technology

Our technology enabled this country to capture, count and transmit the votes of over 50 million people, spread out over several thousand islands. It also helped create a more transparent election process that reduced fraud and violence – and increased investment ratings.

Software

Election-360

This application helped manage all logistic and operational processes in the preparation and conduction of the election. Election-360 facilitated communications between operators and field personnel – and offered a detailed, real-time vision of all the events taking place during election day. Read more about Election-360

Real-time Electoral Information System (REIS)

REIS provided the client with a safe tallying, monitoring and awarding system, to receive data in a decentralised and hierarchical scheme. In the Philippines, deployment spanned 1,700 different locations.

Hardware

SAES-1800

This optical scanner unit registered and tallied the votes marked in election ballots. It allowed the Philippines midterm elections to be completely auditable, accurate and secure – since it encrypted votes with 256-bit symmetric algorithms. It could also function with limited power availability and was capable of transmitting across a variety of networks, providing the flexibility needed to operate in remote island locations.

Data centres

These provided our client, COMELEC, all political parties, the press and observers with a fail-safe, efficient, and secure way of monitoring the platform and getting help desk services in real-time.

Online results web system

There was great interest in the elections and its results from ordinary people. To enhance the transparency and auditability of the election process, we published official results on the Internet, as they came in.

Transmission platform

Our transmission platform helped securing reliable telecommunication services to transmit election data. It achieved this by integrating resources of the main telecommunications companies in the Philippines.