ELECTORAL REFORM

January 29, 2013, 9:00am to 12:00nn Metro Park Ballroom, Pasay City

A roundtable discussion on

in cooperation with:

P R O G R A M
08:30 - 09:00 am 09:00 - 09:05 am Registration Welcome Remarks Dr. Emerlinda Roman Chairman of the Board Angara Centre for Law and Economics Opening Remarks Hon. Sixto Brillantes, Jr. Chairman, Commission on Elections Introduction of First Speaker What can we learn from the 2010 Philippine Elections Data? Dr. John VC Nye George Mason University Introduction of Second Speaker Electoral Quality and its Consequences in Comparative Perspective Dr. Alberto Simpser University of Chicago Health Break Snacks will be served Roundtable Discussion Corazon dela Paz-Bernardo Chair, NAMFREL Mahar K. Mangahas President, Social Weather Stations (SWS) Cesar Flores Zavarce President, Smartmatic Asia Pacific Open Forum

09:05 - 09:15 am

09:15 - 09:20 am 09:20 - 09:50 am

09:50 - 09:55 am 09:55 - 10:25 am

10:25 - 10:40 am 10:40 - 11:40 am

11:40 - 12:00 nn

Elizabeth Enriquez, Ph.D. UP College of Mass Communication Master of Ceremonies

SPEAKERS
SIXTO S. BRILLANTES, JR. Chairman Commission on Elections

tty. Sixto S. Brillantes, Jr. is the current Chairman of the Commission on Elections (COMELEC). He was appointed by His Excellency President Benigno S. Aquino III on January 16, 2011. After two years in public service, Chairman Brillantes has successfully undertaken and implemented relevant programs and reforms within the COMELEC. A renowned pride of the Bedan Community, Chairman Brillantes is both a Certified Public Accountant and a Bar Topnotcherplacing 7th in the 1965 Bar Examinations. Armed with decades of legal practice and considering the COMELECs extensive preparations for May 13, 2013, Chairman Brillantes is looking forward for the successful conduct of the 2nd Automated Elections in the Philippines. JOHN V.C. NYE Executive Director Angara Centre for Law and Economics

ohn V.C. Nye holds the Fredric Bastiat Chair in Political Economy and is Professor of Economics at George Mason University. He also serves as a Research Director at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow and as Executive Director of the Angara Centre for Law and Economics in Manila. He is a specialist in economic history and the New Institutional Economics. Prior to coming to GMU, he was a professor for over two decades at Washington University in St. Louis and was a founding member of the International Society for the New Institutional Economics. He has done research on a variety of topics from Anglo-French trade war and the rise of the British fiscal state, to Soviet collusion in championship chess, demography and cultural norms in Asia, and problems of reform in developing nations. He is currently directing a large scale cross national project on the importance of human capital for preferences, achievement, and institutional quality. He has been a consultant to the USAID, the ADB, and other national and multinational organizations and is working on a World Bank project to study regional differences in economic development in the Philippines. He received a BS in Physics from the California Institute of Technology and an MA and PhD in Economics from Northwestern University. He is the author of War, Wine, and Taxes: The Political Economy of Anglo-French Trade 1689-1900 (Princeton, 2007) and was co-editor with John Drobak of Frontiers in the New Institutional Economics (Academic Press, 1997).

ALBERTO SIMPSER

lberto Simpser is currently Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science in the University of Chicago. Simpser teaches several doctorate and undergraduate courses on political economy of development. He recently wrote More than Winning: Why Parties and Governments Manipulate Elections, a comparative study of the incentives underpinning electoral manipulation around the world. Professor Simpser earned his MA and Ph.D. from Stanford University in Economics and Political Science respectively. His took his undergraduate studies in Engineering Sciences at Harvard University. He is a member of the American Political Science Association, Midwest Political Science Association, American Economic Association, and International Society for New Institutional Economics and Latin American Studies Association.

DISCUSSANTS
MAHAR K. MANGAHAS President Social Weather Stations (SWS)

r. Mahar K. Mangahas earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago in 1970. He has done research on rice economics, land reform, poverty, hunger, income inequality, quality-of-life, governance, and public opinion. He was Professor of Economics at the University of the Philippines, VicePresident for Research of the Development Academy of the Philippines, and UNICEF Consultant on Social Indicators for the Governments of Malaysia and Indonesia. He was Editor of the Philippine Economic Journal, President of the Philippine Economic Society, President of the Marketing and Opinion Research Society of the Philippines, co-founder of the Philippine Agrarian Reform Foundation, co-founder of the Foundation for Economic Freedom, and Philippine national representative of the World Association for Public Opinion Research. He has been a board member of the International Society for Quality of Life Studies since 2005. In 1985, Mangahas co-founded and since then has been President of Social Weather Stations, the Philippines leading institute in quality-of-life monitoring, opinion polling, and social survey archiving. In 2001, he received WAPORs Helen Dinerman Award, the public opinion professions highest honor, for championing the rights and freedoms of survey researchers in the Philippines. In 2011, he received the University of Chicago Alumni Award for Public Service, for being a powerful influence in helping to define a nations identity and to restore democracy by demonstrating the public will through numbers. [His] work much of which was done under difficult political circumstanceshas led to important public dialogue and policy changes for his nation.

CORAZON S. DE LA PAZ-BERNARDO Chairperson National Citizens Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL)

orazon S. de la Paz-Bernardo is the chairperson of NAMFREL and honorary president of the International Social Security Association (ISSA), an affiliate of the International Labor Organization and based in Geneva, Switzerland. She served as the first female and non-European president of ISSA from 2004 to 2010. She was also the first woman president of the Social Security System (SSS) of the Philippines from 2001 to 2008, and the first woman ever to be elected partner of Price Waterhouse International in its 100-year history. She is also a member of the Cornell University Council, the Boards of Trustees of University of the East, UE Ramon Magsaysay Memorial Medical Center, Miriam College, the Makati Business Club and other nongovernment organizations. She has received numerous awards, including, among others, the Ten Outstanding Women in the Nations Service (TOWNS) and the Outstanding Professional in Public Accounting from the Professional Regulations Commission. She topped the 1960 CPA Board Exams and earned her MBA in 1965 from Cornell University under the Fulbright grant. CESAR FLORES ZAVARCE President Smartmatic Asia Pacific

sar Flores is the president of Smartmatic Asia Pacific, responsible for developing the three business units the company has in the region. He has been part of Smartmatic since 2005; he started out in the Sales Department, where he participated in bidding processes in countries such as Belgium, the Philippines, Colombia, among others. He was at the helm of the first automated elections in the Philippines, one of biggest automated election projects ever conducted, and the largest elections that a private company has ever undertaken. He is also a key spokesperson for Smartmatic. He has over 15 years of experience in international executive management, business development, and sales of complex solutions and large-scale projects to governments and enterprises worldwide. He is fluent in four languages. He studied Sociology and Economics from universities in Venezuela and Germany.

What Can We Learn from the 2010 Philippine Elections Data?: Computerization, Turnout, and Voting By John V.C. Nye, Desire Desierto, and Alberto Simpser Presentation to the Angara Centre, January 2013, Manila, Philippines. Abstract

his is the first project that looks at the specific impact of the computerization of Philippine elections in 2010. In replacing handwritten ballots with electronic voting one might have supposed that poor, rural, and relatively less educated voters would have been favored by the change. But turnout analysis seems to suggest the opposite. Overall voter turnout was lower in 2010 than than 2004. Furthermore, the drop in turnout for rural compared to non-rural municipalities was significant and substantial. This effect is even stronger when only considering low income municipalities. Thus, contrary to expectations, the automation of voting seems to have disenfranchised relatively poorer voters from rural areas. One explanation for this might be the fear of dealing with a seemingly complicated, unfamiliar voting system on the part of uninformed voters. Government information campaigns to prepare voters for the new technology were not entirely successful. This technology-dissemination problem seems to be supported by evidence that municipalities that created more cooperatives in 2004-2010 had a smaller turnout drop than those that created fewer cooperatives suggesting that high social capital areas could have diffused information more readily and efficiently. We also use statistical techniques based on Benfords Law and other analyses to see if there were obvious anomalies in voting turnout for senatorial elections. Our preliminary analysis shows no gross irregularities at the national level. Electoral Quality and its Consequences in Comparative Perspective By Alberto Simpser Abstract

very electoral system is concerned about the quality of its elections and about the level of voter participation. I explore the connections between these two dimensions of elections: quality and turnout. Looking around the world, two broad patterns of electoral manipulation can be distinguished. In the first pattern, termed marginal manipulation, vigorous electoral competition impels two or more parties to do what they can to win. In the second pattern, excessive manipulation, a ruling party manipulates far beyond the point needed to win, or when victory is assured in the first place. Both patterns are common, but their consequences are very different. Marginal manipulation tends to be associated with high levels of voter participation, while excessive manipulation tends to deter citizens (especially opposition sympathizers) from showing up at the polls. Of these two, excessive manipulation is the most pernicious, since it has self-reinforcing properties.