It may take a voter an average of 8 minutes and 4 seconds to fill up the election ballot during the country’s first automated elections in May 2010. This is the result of a time-and-motion study conducted by YouthVotePhilippines among college students.
YouthVote, in partnership with the First Asia Institute of Technology and Humanities (FAITH), PoliticalArena.com, with support from the Former Senior Government Officials (FSGO) and the Commission on Elections (COMELEC), conducted the simulation study in response to concerns regarding delays that might be caused by the clustering of precincts in the coming elections. COMELEC plans to collapse the existing 320,415 voting precincts into 80,146 clustered precincts in order to match the available 82,200 counting machines, also known as PCOS (Precinct Count Optical Scan).
With this new set up, up to 1,000 registered voters will have to cast their votes in every voting center within 11 hours, unlike only a maximum of 200 registered voters casting their ballots in 9 hours in the previous set up.
In past elections, voters write on the names of their selected candidates on the ballot, but next year’s automated elections will have the names of all candidates printed on the ballot that has been designed for use with the PCOS machines. The voter will simply have to shade the oval beside their choice of candidate for each position.
For its time-and-motion study, YouthVote designed an improvised ballot based on the latest sample design shared by COMELEC. YouthVote’s improvised ballot is 25 inches long, uses an Arial Narrow size 12 font, and lists substitute questions for 32 electoral positions and substitutes for 339 candidates printed on both sides of the paper.
The time-and-motion study was conducted in a classroom in the FAITH campus in Tanuan, Batangas. Close to 700 2nd to 4th year college students, all of voting age, participated in the voting simulation. YouthVote representatives noted that the simulation gave a best time/case scenario for the elections since the study participants were all college students who are used to taking standardized tests that employ a similar format to the ballot. The study focused only on filling up the ballots and does not look into the use of PCOS machines for vote counting, since the improvised ballots are not machine readable.
Results of the simulation show that an average of 8 minute and 4 second for a student voter to fill up a ballot. Assuming non-student voters will require double the time, YouthVote sees the need to have at least 24 voters filling up their ballots simultaneously at a clustered precinct in order to complete the filling up of ballots in 11 hours. However, this doesn’t take into account the time required for other activities before and after filling up the ballot.
Anticipating that non-student voters will take a longer time to fill up the new ballot, YouthVote recommends further simulation studies on other sectors, especially the elderly. Moreover, COMELEC and other groups’ voters’ education programs should include familiarization with the new ballot and voting process, and encourage voters to come to the voting station decided on their candidates.
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Posted by Paola Deles, YouthVotePhilippines core member
Posted by youthvotephilippines 
