The Philippine Online Chronicles

Several poll watch groups are asking the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to look into the glitches that occurred during the country’s first automated elections last week, saying that although the transmission of results was fast, many errors remain to be addressed including the disenfranchisement of up to five million voters and the use of faulty compact flash (CF) cards.

“While it is acknowledged that the transmission and initial tallying of results were fast, the whole automated process was fraught with problems – from poor preparations, inadequate training of BEIs, absence of rigorous testing of machines and the lack of education among the public,” said watchdog group Kontra Daya.

Kontra Daya listed down seven suggestions for Comelec to consider, including a review of the clustering of precincts which resulted in long lines at the polling areas, more intensive training for those manning the polls, conducting additional mock elections, probing the faulty CF cards and the reason why ultraviolet lamps were not used in some precincts (to check the seal of the ballots), surveying the number of disenfranchised voters, and examining reports of malfunctioning Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines.

Another watchdog group, the Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG), has also asked Comelec to cease destroying the faulty CF cards, saying that it is better to test the pieces of hardware to see what went wrong.

Roland Tolentino, dean of the University of the Philippines College of Mass Communications and the People’s Movement for Change (Pagbabago!) spokesperson, added that, “By no means can the automated elections be declared an unqualified success without any proof to show that the electronic count tallies with the actual votes cast.”

Pagbabago! sponsored a delegation from the Compact for Peaceful and Democratic Elections, which sent out foreign monitors to observe the elections in various precincts around the country during the elections. According to their findings, the polls in some areas were “rushed, ill-tested, incompletely certified and therefore anomalous.”

“The mounting reports of discrepancies in several areas put the claim under a cloud of doubt,” Tolentino said.

Comelec spokesperson James Jimenez on the other hand, said that a lot of the discrepancies that cropped up was not due to inconsistencies in the automated elections system, but human error.

"Automation was never really autonomous from human participation... That’s [human participation] where the errors are cropping up... The system itself worked perfectly, which is the reason why there are significantly fewer errors and significantly more results available from the precinct transmission," he said.

As of Sunday, Comelec was still waiting for around three million votes to come in. The poll body hopes to be able to announce the winners for the Senatorial race on Monday.