190 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy, Second Edition contributed largely to the low turnout of votes on the PL system during elections. As a recourse, many Party-list groups are compelled to conduct voter education on the system as part of their campaign and mobilize voters to turn out at the precinct polls as a means of minimizing this type of voter disenfranchisement. The adverse effects of election automation has further contributed to voter disenfranchisement on the PL system (see also Azurin's chapter in this book). The management and use of outsourced technology (through Smartmatic) in the 2010, 2013, and 2016 elections have been assessed by various election watchdogs as riddled with low trustworthiness, inaccuracy, and vulnerability to program manipulation.5 In 2012, CenPEG Fellow, Felix Muga II, pointed out that Smartmatic's PCOS machines used by Comelec claimed an accuracy rate of 99.06% as against the 99.995% required by law. This resulted in statistical ties among many of the Party-list groups further complicating the allocation of seats, a process with a long history of variable and contested allocation formulas since the inception of the PL system.6 More than 20 years ago, there had been calls to reform the Comelec given its failure to address the systemic problems of fraud and violence and one of the key solutions planned was to modernize the election system. This has been addressed by adopting the automated election system (AES) in the 2010 national elections but the election process itself has been haunted by reports of technical glitches aside from inaccuracies and other system vulnerabilities. Comelec ofcials may have missed the target insofar as reform itself – it should have looked inward, instead. Cleo Calimbahin (2010) identies three essential problems within the poll body, namely, external clientelistic relations, internal clientelistic relations, and organizational problems which, she said, were evident in the rst automated elections of 2010. Contextualizing the role of Comelec within the broader Philippine politics, she views the poll body's inefciency as essentially “symptomatic of weak state capacity.” The solution to Comelec problems “goes beyond automation.”7 “Incredibly incompetent,” is how former Comelec Chairman Christian Monsod puts it in describing Comelec's election management. In his own assessment of the 2010 automated elections, Monsod raised the issue of Comelec's lack of transparency in responding to the issues raised in the public on the automated election system thus resulting in higher distrust of the poll body. One of the current Comelec commissioners, Luie Guia, noted in an interview with CenPEG the urgency of upgrading election management to comply with present demands. Guia expounded on the need for more managerial expertise particularly in information technology (IT). Comelec's present structure, he says, puts premium on legal expertise when the concrete demand is competence in operations and management.8 Conrming Guia's observation, Nelson J. Celis, spokesperson of the Automated Election System Watch (AES Watch), agrees that Comelec has lost its independence by relying,