Teachers battle lethargy, exhaustion to manually check poll results

Janet Layosa-Arbon, along with two co-teachers, spent more than six hours waiting for a Quezon City polling precinct to close on Monday night. Waiting time could have been better spent taking a nap, she told GMANews.TV.

But since her team arrived earlier than expected at Krus na Ligas Elementary School near the University of the Philippines campus, they had no other choice but to hang around until they could get down to business. And business meant another seven hours of manually tallying the votes after polling centers closed at seven in the evening. Arbon is the chair of a Random Manual Audit Team (RMAT) assigned to manually record the selected precinct’s election results, checking whether these correspond to what automated voting machines have recorded. At around 1:35 am, school assistants brought down precinct 1223’s humongous ballot bin from the third to the first floor, to be opened in the presence of witnesses, and each of the votes they contain so that these could be counted. Witnesses included a volunteer from the National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL) and a lone journalist. Precinct 1223 is just one of the 1,145 polling centers pre-selected by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) and its accredited arm Philippine Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) to undergo manual audit to check on the accuracy of the automated counting of the votes. The Comelec and the PPCRV on Monday selected the precincts in a raffle on Monday at the Comelec command center at the Philippine International Convention in Pasay City. The missing ballot The three RMAT members first checked on the 173 extra ballots shredded by the precinct’s Board of Election Inspectors. They then looked at the BEI’s report, which indicated that only 743 of the precinct’s over 800 registered voters cast their ballots, excluding six whose votes were rejected but were nevertheless submitted to them. After at least three times of counting the oversized ballots, a member declares, with a hint of frustration, “May nawawalang isang balota (There is one ballot is missing)." Only 742 ballots were counted. After running out of theories to explain the discrepancy in the wee hours of the morning, Arbon decided to proceed with the audit, saying she will just include the case of the missing ballot in her report sheet. “Pwede bang ‘wag ko nang sabihin yung numbers? Dagdag pa ‘yun sa effort ko eh (Can I just not read out the candidates’ numbers? It’ll just be additional effort on my part)," Arbon jestingly asks the two members, who are tasked with recording the votes in two separate sheets to be submitted the next morning to Comelec. But the two, saying the numbers will aid them in locating the names in the sheets — which is wider than their work desks — insist that the number be read aloud. They prevailed in the end.

High school teacher Janet Layosa-Arbon, who heads the Random Manual Audit Team assigned in Krus na Ligas Elementary School in Quezon City, reads out the votes from over 700 ballots to be manually tallied by two other team members. This is to check whether the results recorded by the counting machine tallies with the results obtained through manual counting. Jerrie Abella

Arbon read out only the votes for president and vice president, as well as for the mayoral and congressional bets for the city’s fourth district. After every one hundred ballots, the team stopped to check if the two tally sheets’ records corresponded to each other. After almost two hours, the NAMFREL volunteer informs the team that they spent an average of 45 minutes for every one hundred ballots, excluding the time they spent on checking the sheets. “May kasama pang biruan ‘yan. So pwede pang mapaikli, (That includes time for joking with each other, so we can still shorten that)," Arbon says. The team goes on with the counting, stopping for a few seconds to remark on voters who leave their votes blank for certain positions. “Itong isang ito, galit sa Quezon City. Wala siyang mayor at Congressman, (This one, he’s not very much fond of Quezon City. He didn’t vote for anyone for mayor and Congressman)," Arbon declares as she carefully places the ballot on top of a growing pile beside her. The process is repeated with a mind-numbing regularity for several more hours: Arbon reading out names of candidates and the two members carefully tallying the votes in their respective tally sheets. At around four in the morning, they stop to go to a comfort room and take a cigarette break. In just a few minutes they are back at their respective spots, eager to finish the audit before sunrise. After 7 hours It took them until past eight in the morning to read all the 742 ballots, with no major problem encountered except for one ballot which had two candidates marked for district representative, and the missing ballot. But their job wasn’t finished yet. Arbon still had to find a vehicle to transport the ballots. Comelec staffers who were supposed to bring them using a truck left with the ballots from the other precincts. And they never came back. “Humiram pa ako ng sasakyan ng barangay, at ako mismo ang nag-drive (I had to borrow the village’s vehicle and drive it myself," Arbon says in a phone interview, right after she transported the ballots past noon on Tuesday. The only problem she now has, which is also the problem of the other RMATs employed across the country, is when they will be paid the P3,000 honorarium and the P2,000 meal and transportation allowance. “Buti pa ‘yung mga BEI bayad na kagabi pa. Kami ni hindi naming alam kung kailan kami babayaran (Good thing for the BEIs that they were already paid as early as Monday night. For us RMATs, we weren’t even advised when the payment will arrive)," Arbon laments. But after participating in a tedious manual audit that kept her awake for more than 24 hours, payment is the least of her concerns. On that Tuesday morning, a day after the Philippines' held its first nationwide automated polls, Arbon said that what she needed was a good sleep. And when she wakes up, Arbon hopes to be greeted with news not only about her honorarium but that the elections she helped facilitate have indeed been credible. - RJAB Jr., GMANews.TV