More than a week after the elections, lingering issues on the automated election system and the allegations of fraud coming from the left and right still keep us on the edge each morning as we read the news. The election was an improvement only in the sense that it is being compared to the speed of the old manual method; however, it is a failure when held to its promises of having a fraud-free and clean elections. There were estimates done by NAMFREL saying around five million voters voluntarily disenfranchising themselves due to the long line in the PCOS machine. This is in addition to those disenfranchised because the PCOS machine rejected their ballots for various reasons. Presidential candidates Es-trada, Delos Reyes, Madrigal and Perlas are coming up with complaints and with some withdrawing what they conceded earlier. It is important to make a comprehensive summing up of the project implementation of the AES, including the story of the discarded flash disks, whose contents were ordered to be destroyed already by Comelec. Obviously, there is much to be done and corrected for the automated election system to be truly reflective of democracy in the country. Some say that since the election result were largely reflected by the pre-election surveys, we can and should do away with the electoral exercise altogether. However, there are limitations on these surveys as they tend to undersample block and regional voting. The observed regional turnout for the Ako Bicol (AKB) party in the (obviously) Bicol provinces probably made the difference that catapulted them to being number one in the party list elections. The vote delivery of the various religious and political blocs has to be also taken into account. Furthermore, most of us would not approve in having a survey firm replace the one person, one vote maxim. On the other hand, there is a branch of political science or mathematics to studying election and poll results. Called 'psephology, it uses statistical analysis and game theory to study elections and opinion polls. Deriving its name from the Greek word for pebble which the ancient Greeks used as ballots, it compiles historical precinct voting returns for elections and calculates indicators on its fairness or disproportionality. Can an election exercise be unfair? Or worse, can an election exercise be undemocratic? It turns out that it has already been mathematically shown that any election exercise cannot simultaneously guarantee fair play and perfect democracy. Kenneth Arrow in 1951 has shown that non-democratic results from any democratic voting system, despite any actual cheating or ballot-rigging. This impossibility theorem was aptly summarised by Paul Samuelson who said perfect democracyis the search for a chimera, for a logical self-contradiction. Both Arrow and Samuelson won the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics. Our experience in what is termed as 'first-past-the-post election system in which the election winner is determined by the highest polling candidate. The analogy is much like a horse race where the first horse past the winning mark gets to be declared the winner. The presidential, vice-presidential and senatorial elections that we are familiar with are all variations of this 'first-past-the-post system. One of the major criticisms of this system is that the winner is not necessarily the choice of the majority of the voters but only the highest polling candidate. In Parliaments, it has a tendency to under-represent minority opinions; while giving large parties disproportionality a large share of the vote. For single choice positions, such as the presidential post, the difficulty posed for the 'first-past-the-post system can be summarised in the maxim: All votes for anyone other than the second place are votes for the winner, because these votes deny to the second place votes that could have made him win. In an election such as the one recently concluded, there were 10 candidates for president with common constituencies and even common platforms. The second and third placers would have won if their votes were combined together. A similar study can be done with regard to the party list system. With the presence of new regional parties and even government supported or initiated parties, a new partylist landscape has emerged. The Carpio formula used by the Comelec in apportioning the seats in Congress under the party list law now allows small parties with less than a percent of the partylist vote to be part of the House of Representatives and limits those with larger share of votes to three, thus having what is termed as wasted votes. Can we indeed measure democracy? The challenges of addressing the economic and social crisis would depend on how the new government would tackle genuine agrarian reform and industrial development. In the end, democracy would be measured on how the new dispensation would result in concrete benefits for the majority of the people. Manila Times