Comelec chief: No audit before poll winners are proclaimed

Commission on Elections (Comelec) chairman Jose Melo on Wednesday rejected the idea of conducting the random manual audit before the declaration of the winners in the May polls, saying that it will only cause unnecessary delays. “(We don’t want) a simple audit (to) deter proclamation," Melo said in a press briefing. The poll body chief issued the statement after some groups asserted that the random manual audit be done right after the election results are transmitted and before the winners are proclaimed. (See: More voting machines should be audited to ensure polls' credibility) Section 24 of Republic Act 9369 requires a random manual audit to be conducted in one precinct per congressional district in each province and city. “Any difference between the automated and manual count will result in the determination of root cause and initiate a manual count for those precincts affected by the computer or procedural error," it further said. But Melo said that conducting the audit before the proclamation would cause a great delay because the auditors would still have to “reconcile" the marks on a ballot that were recognized and not recognized by the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machine. “Magkakaroon ng variation yan, magdedebate, madedelay yan. Ang mark na ganyan, bibilangin ng manual, pero hindi binilang ng makina, sino paniniwalaan mo (There will definitely be a variation, triggering debate, which would delay everything. Marks like those that are counted manually, but not counted by the machine—which would you believe)," he said. He further said that it would be fine if only the proclamation of the winners of the local elections would be delayed, but he said that even the national positions would have to await proclamation. “If we are going to delay the proclamation because of a simple concern of one machine, bakit pa tayo nag-automate (why did we automate at all)?" he said. Earlier, the National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel) and the Consortium of Electoral Reforms (CER) also asked the poll body to increase the number of voting machines that will undergo auditing. The groups said that at least 2.5 to 3 percent of the 82,200 PCOS units or five poll machines per congressional district should be manually audited to give enough assurance that the results of the elections are credible. —Kimberly Jane T. Tan/JV, GMANews.TV