ELECTRONIC governance is not one and the same with digital democracy because the former could still be used even in monarchical or dictatorial governments.
In that sense, those who live under democratic governments could be considered luckier because they could benefit from two technological movements that are actually complimentary to each other.
Let us just say therefore that governing is one side of the equation regardless of whether there is voting or not. In other words, people all over the world should make the best of what they have, and if they are lucky, they should make the best of both worlds.
There was a time when electronic governance could happen only within a government office. That was the time when only the dumb terminals could access the mainframes. That was the time when the dumb terminals functioned as the clients and the mainframes in effect functioned as the servers.
All that changed when personal computers (PCs) came along because when that happened, high performance computers (HPCs) became the servers, and the PCs became the clients. That architecture improved further when true servers replaced the HPCs and more powerful workstations replaced the ordinary PCs, thus bringing the client-server environment into a higher level.
Fast forward to our present times, we are no longer talking of single servers in local area networks (LANs) within offices, because now we are talking of infinite clusters of servers that are located in the internet cloud, servers that could serve any client anywhere in the world, regardless of whether it is a desktop device or a handheld device.
As an improvement to all of these, smartphones are now capable of being a client as well, thus smartphones are now part of the universe of handheld devices, adding to the numbers of laptops, tablets and phablets.
In theory, digital democracy should not be applicable only to the electoral process, but also to each and every decision making process that is open to the participation of citizens. At the very least, citizens could be involved only in the consultation process, perhaps in the form of online and mobile surveys.
As an alternative, citizens could be involved in mock elections, so that the government could feel the pulse of the people, even if their choices are not really counted as real votes. What is important is that the identity of the virtual voter or survey respondent is real and is verifiable.
In its original form, democracy during the days of the early Greek city states allowed the participation of all citizens in public meetings, by way of open voting similar to Viva Voce as we know it today.
It seems, however, that when their populations ballooned, they eventually had to elect senators that represented them in their Senates. It goes without saying that the Greeks resorted to that option at that time because they had no means to allow the participation of all voting citizens all at the same time.
Again fast forward to our present times, we now have the online and mobile infrastructure that would allow all citizens to vote on any measure at any time, from anywhere, using any available device. There may be other requirements and conditions that would make this possible, but the basic requirement is that the identity of the voter should be real and should be verifiable.
Actually by comparison, it would be easier now to validate the identity of voters online, because we could require multiple authentication barriers. Compare that to the present manual system wherein there is only one identification method via the voters ID cards.
As it is now, there are already about 40 million Filipino citizens in Facebook alone, and that is not counting the others who have accounts in the other social networking sites and email service providers. As it is now, all of these netizens are already capable of answering online surveys. In some cases, there are already virtual voting events in the internet, as users are given the option to choose between two or more choices. Not too long ago, it could be argued that online voting is discriminatory, because not everyone could vote through the internet. That is no longer the problem now, because most Filipinos already have mobile phones.
According to some estimates, about 50 percent of the mobile devices that are being used now in the Philippines are already smartphones, and the numbers are already increasing because the new units that are being sold in the market are smartphones already.
As far as universal access from mobile phones is concerned however, there is no real problem because even the old legacy phones could still be used for mobile voting, by way of the old short messaging service (SMS) gateways, using the old syntax. Voting via SMS is even possible for owners of mobile phones who are not yet adept in accessing websites or using mobile apps.
For practical reasons, it is now easier to use mobile apps for voting, instead of web browsers. The bottom line however is that any citizen can use any device that he or she is comfortable with, and is accessible to them.
Having said that, I would even say that automated teller machines (ATMs) and point of sale (POS) machines could be used, the latter perhaps with the combination of optical mark readers (OMRs) similar to what was used in the precinct count online system (PCOS) before. For the record, I proposed all these when I submitted my report as the Chairman of the COMELEC Modernization Committee many years ago./PN
