Comelec thanks PRRD for confidence in poll body
The Commission on Elections (Comelec) welcomed the statement of Presidential Rodrigo Duterte that he sees no cheating in the just-concluded national and local polls.
“We really are grateful to the President of the Republic for saying that. As we all know since the very beginning, that is the goal of the Comelec to ensure that the election is credible, honest, accurate and clean,” Comelec acting spokesman lawyer John Rex Laudiangco said in a press briefing on Thursday.
“We thank the President and also the international community for their statement (of support),” he added.
Laudiangco said they have ordered the investigation of vote-counting machines (VCMs) that malfunctioned during Monday’s electoral exercise.
“We said the 915 machines that encounter(ed) problems account for only 0.5 or 0.8 percent of the total 106,174 VCMs. And that’s the first phase of the investigation. The second phase of our investigation is the technical part,” he said.
“Three, where can we improve the technology so that we can set new terms of reference. Hopefully, in 2025, we will have new machines. We will be able to improve on this given the lessons on our VCM issues today," Laudiangco added.
Duterte earlier urged the Comelec to look into hundreds of VCMs that malfunctioned during the polls so as not to cast doubts on the integrity of the election results.
Meanwhile, Laudiangco did not elaborate on reports that Smartmatic international, the electronic solutions provider contracted by the Comelec, will be blacklisted.
“In our Procurement Law, Republic Act 9184, or the Government Procurement Reform Act, there are specific rules to disqualify or blacklist a certain provider or contractor, and until such time, procuring entity, Comelec declares a specific contractor or supplier to be blacklisted... that's why I still don't want to talk because all these matters are not just the budgetary part, not just the payment part, but the compliance with the contract will be dealt with in the assessment that will take place,” he said.
Transparent since Day 1
The poll body maintained they have been transparent in all their proceedings amid allegations of electoral fraud by some quarters.
Even poll watch groups and international observers have vouched for the credibility of the recent automated elections.
“Right from the start we already showed to everybody all our proceedings are transparent just to show to the people that what we are doing is [in] accordance with law and rules,” Laudiangco told a press briefing on Friday, May 13.
We stick [to] performing our functions within [the] bounds of law and rules. We could proudly state na wala pong dayaan na naganap (no electoral fraud happened). The credibility of the elections is there,” he added.
Thousands of rallyists gathered outside the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) to protest the alleged irregularities and cheating in the recent elections.
Poll watchdog Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) said there was a 100-percent match rate in the manual validation of 16,820 election returns that it processed so far.
Experts from the University of the Philippines (UP) School of Statistics, independent analytics group OCTA Research, and poll watchdog National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL) also debunked cheating allegations pertaining to the supposed 68:32 vote ratio in favor of leading presidential candidate Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. over his closest rival, Vice President Leni Robredo.
Further, United States Department spokesperson Ned Price had said the automated elections in the Philippines “have been conducted in line with international standards and without significant incident.”
Laudiangco also addressed doubts on the quick transmission of election returns (ERs) despite the notoriously slow internet connection in the Philippines.
“We don’t really need a large bandwidth in the transmission,” he said, explaining that the transmission of election returns is akin to sending text messages.
“So it is not impossible given the current infrastructure natin,” he stated.
The Comelec spokesman also noted that 99.2 percent of the 106,174 vote counting machines functioned on the day of the elections.
“Ang hindi lang po nakapagtransmit kaagad ay ‘yung hindi po nakahabol doon sa unang bugso ng transmission na 950 [VCMs] na nagkaissue (The only ones that were not able to immediately transmit during the first wave of the transmission were the 950 [VCMs] which had issues),” Laudiangco said.
Rejected ballots
Addressing reports that there were 100,000 rejected ballots in Negros Occidental and Bacolod. Laudiangco said voters whose ballots were rejected by the VCMs don’t necessarily lose their votes.
Laudiangco said VCMs are designed to accept or enable the feeding of the ballots in four different ways.
If there is an instance where the ballot is rejected on the first try, it is “logged” or remembered by the machine and the board of election inspectors (BEI) only need to try other ways to feed the ballots.
“Remember that we have four ways to feed the ballots: upfront, dorsal, and then from the opposite directions. Now, all of the systems that we deployed from the machines up to the transmission, they are designed to login each and every action taken,” Laudiangco explained. “What happens if the voter’s ballot got rejected by the machine? That is already one count recorded. You feed again and got rejected, another record. The machine does not determine if that is the same ballot or not. What it counts is the number of attempts so practically, we accounted those inputs about the rejected ballots,” he said.
Despite the reported rejected ballots, the Comelec has accounted for all of the deployed ballots during the elections.
This means that all ballots were eventually fed into the VCMs or if there were copies that were not entered into the machines, they were duly noted by the BEIs and reported to the Comelec. (With a report from Jel Santos)