Comelec asked to reconsider parallel manual count decision

Senatorial aspirant and Akbayan Rep. Risa Hontiveros on Thursday formally asked the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to reconsider the conduct of a parallel manual count during next week's polls after automated voting machines incurred glitches. In a five-page petition, Hontiveros said the poll body must reconsider its earlier decision refusing to conduct a parallel manual count after some "significant and extremely distressing" events took place earlier in the week.

Hontiveros was referring to the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) units tested last Monday which failed to read some votes accurately, forcing the Comelec to pull out all the compact flash (CF) cards in the voting machines. "(These) have underscored substantial weaknesses in the automated election system, leading to a widespread erosion of public trust in the accuracy and validity of the automated count," she said in the motion. Because of this, she said the conduct of a parallel manual count is "essential" to restore some "measure of credibility" to the upcoming electoral exercise. "Gawin sana nila lahat ng paraan para tanggapin ng buong mamamayan ang resulta, isang paraan po itong parallel manual count (I hope the Comelec does everything in its power to make voting process credible. The parallel manual count is one of the ways to do that)," she told reporters after filing the motion. Earlier, the poll body rejected the idea of conducting a parallel count, saying that it would make the elections more vulnerable and open to fraud. It added that the random manual audit (RMA) should be able to satisfy the voters. Section 24 of Republic Act 9369 requires a RMA to be conducted in one precinct per congressional district in each province and city. But after much prodding from groups, the poll body decided to increase this to five precincts per legislative district, which is 1,145 precincts. However, Hontiveros said that the conduct of the RMA is not enough. "The efficacy of the RMA is dependent upon the assumption that, by and large, the automated count will be accurate, and any errors will only involve a small percentage of the total universe of votes," she said. - RJAB Jr., GMANews.TV