Some precincts sent
wrong data – Comelec

The Commission on Elections has guaranteed that its personnel and machines are counting right in the May 10 elections. But is the Comelec counting the right data?

The question emerged after the Comelec en banc on Tuesday issued Resolution No. 8914 ordering the retrieval of the laptops, memory cards, and printed election returns of an undisclosed number of City and Municipal Board of Canvassers to Manila supposedly to validate the election results that they had earlier transmitted to Manila.

Oops! BEIs sent wrong tallies?

The three-page resolution said some local poll officials had mistakenly transmitted to the Comelec servers the results of the test counts conducted three days before poll day, instead of the actual results of the May 10 elections.

The Comelec had required all 76,000 clustered precincts to conduct a final testing and sealing (FTS) procedure five to three days before election day just to make sure that the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines would work all right.

Under this procedure, the board of election inspectors (BEI) of each precinct was asked to have 10 volunteers to cast test ballots, so these could be fed and counted by the PCOS machines. After testing the machines, the BEIs were then directed to “seal” the machine in preparation for the May 10 elections.

But in its latest resolution dated May 12, the Comelec en banc said some BEIs had “inadvertently saved the FTS results,” or the results of the pre-election testing, in the PCOS back-up memory card. Now, this wouldn’t have been a problem, since the official election results are transmitted via modem by the PCOS machines to the municipal and city canvassing centers. The memory cards were only meant as a back-up.

However, in cases where the PCOS machines could not transmit the results because of poor cellular signal, the BEIs pulled out their memory cards and physically brought these to the canvassing centers for the tally.

In the resolution, the Comelec said it belatedly discovered that some of these memory cards contained, not the actual election results, but the results of the final testing and sealing procedure. It is not clear just how many precincts made this mistake.

The Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) tried to determine if this mistake was big or small enough to affect, or not to affect, the results of the Comelec’s official tally. With help from our editorial partner, GMANews.tv, the PCIJ found 297 precincts that had tallies of 10 votes and fewer. This is because the FTS procedure called for only 10 volunteers to cast their test votes.

According to the database of GMANews.tv, the precincts with 10 or fewer votes recorded in the Comelec ‘s partial, unofficial tally so far include the following: 61 precincts from overseas absentee voting (OAV) centers; 19 precincts in Cabanatuan city; 10 in Bacoor, Cavite; 7 in Cebu City; 8 in Datu Salibo, Maguindanao; 5 in Navotas City; 5 in San Pedro Laguna; and 5 in Mandaue City. For the OAV vote, 43 clustered precincts in Hong Kong and 18 precincts in Singapore registered zero votes.

Given the fact that each clustered precinct enrolls a maximum of 1,000 voters, the 297 clustered precincts apparently affected by this error could represent an aggregate theoretical total of 297,000 at the most. The clustered precincts of the overseas absentee voters are advisedly much smaller.

While the numbers may have an impact on local races, they do not appear to be significant enough to affect the race for the positions of president, vice president and senators.

Thus far, the Comelec has started its random manual count of the votes, and election officials said only less than four percent of the votes from over 76,000 precincts all across the country have yet to be transmitted to the Comelec central servers.

The four percent balance of votes to be transmitted represent about 1.5 million votes.
MEANWHILE, election watchdog Halalang Marangal has asked officials of Smartmatic to “keep their presence in the country while a number of contests in the 2010 elections remain unresolved.”

In its contract with the Comelec, Smartmatic, the provider of the PCOS machines, committed to remain with the project only until may 15, Saturday.

“The vice-presidential election is yet to be settled. The contest between the 12th and 13th places in the senatorial race still has to be settled too. Hundreds of local races (have yet) to be settled.

Already news is coming in about delayed Election Returns (ERs), malfunctioning, missing or otherwise questionable memory cards, and other indicators of potential or emerging problems,” says Halalang Marangal secretary-general Roberto Verzola.

“This is a very bad time for Smartmatic to leave,” Verzola said. – PCIJ, May 2010