The Philippine Online Chronicles

Manual auditing by the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) showed that the May 10 elections—the country’s first national automated polls—were 99.6% accurate.

The random manual audit, which covered 1,046 clustered precincts, or around 500,000 votes, found that none of the presidential, vice presidential, congressional, gubernatorial and mayoral races “failed the accuracy test of 99 percent.”

“It is a very encouraging report. It means that the machines worked 99 percent,” said Commission on Elections (Comelec) head Jose Melo. “Automation is here to stay. As long as we have the money, we will automate.”

The minor discrepancies, according to PPCRV Chairperson Henrietta de Villa, were due to “clerical” errors and "mathematical errors" or wrong computations by the Board of Election Inspectors (BEI).

However, Comelec’s “action and attention" was called to at least seven precincts which were found to have “large” differences between the manual count and the automated count.

In two precincts in Tarlac and one each in Northern Samar and Basilan, the number of ballots manually counted by the BEIs did not tally with the total number of ballots counted by the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines.

"The number of votes just wouldn't tally. We were suggesting to the Commission en banc recall the team that did the random manual audit and the [board of election inspector] of the precinct to explain the reasons regarding discrepancies on number of votes," said de Villa.

In Lutayan, Sultan Kudarat and Maluso, Basilan, it was noted that there was an exceptionally high number of “rejected ballots.”

"There were stray ballots and rejected ballots and variances in number of votes. The number of votes did not tally with the number of votes counted and the number of voters registered and those who actually voted," de Villa said.

Another precinct in Manila was found to have discrepancies in the automated and manual counts for the mayoralty position in the area. A vertical line running across portions of the ballots may have caused problems in the automated count, said the PPCRV report. An investigation of the PCOS machine revealed "a fiber-like substance, like the ink of the pen" stuck in it.