Comelec denies 57 ‘ghost precincts’

Officials from the Commission on Election (Comelec) on Thursday denied the more than 50 “ghost precincts" that were supposedly discovered by surveyors of election machine supplier Smartmatic-Total Information Management (TIM). The discovery was contained in a report that was used as basis for an article that came out on the online news site Newsbreak on Thursday. Comelec spokesman James Jimenez said the report of the surveyors does not actually claim that the precincts were missing and was just interpreted as "ghost precincts" in the news article. "That's speculation. It was a regular report, it was pretty non-committal," Jimenez said. According to the article, the 57 “ghost precincts" were located in the National Capital Region and seven provinces, most of them from the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). Comelec Commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal chided the author of the report, saying he should have verified the report first with the poll body. "If they simply did their job as a reporter and verified this, we would have simply given him the narrative report for him to be able to come up with a good article, an accurate article," Larrazabal told reporters in a separate interview. Jimenez said there are many reasons why the surveyors, which were hired by Smartmatic-TIM, failed to locate the precincts. He said failure to spot the polling places doesn’t mean they do not exist. Jimenez also asked why the doubt has to immediately fall on the poll body. "Why isn’t the benefit of the doubt given on the surveyors? The weight of doubt should fall on the surveyors," he said. There are 76,340 clustered precincts for the more than 50 million registered voters expected to vote in the May 2010 polls. — Kimberly Jane Tan/KBK/RSJ, GMANews.TV