No indication of fraud during manual audit — Comelec

Amid talk of poll fraud, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) on Wednesday said that partial results from the Random Manual Audit (RMA) prove that there was no systematic rigging of the 2010 automated elections. "We did not see something that will really shock us... overall it looks like the counts of the PCOS machines were consistent," said Comelec Commissioner Lucentio Tagle, co-chair of the Technical Working Group for the RMA, in Filipino. Section 24 of Republic Act 9369 requires that a manual audit be conducted in one precinct per congressional district in each province and city. The Comelec eventually increased this to five precincts per legislative district. The random selection of the precincts that were audited was conducted at the Philippine International Convention Center (PICC) in Pasay City on election day. The selection was done manually by randomly picking a precinct from a large container.

As of Wednesday morning, Tagle said they have already received verified reports from 726 audited precincts. He said they recorded 53 discrepancies in the National Capital Region (NCR). But he said reports showed that whenever there was a supposed discrepancy in the manual and automated count, it would always just boil down to the "appreciation" of the marking on the oval. He explained that sometimes the Special Board of Election Inspector (SBEI) tasked to conduct the RMA would count shadings on ovals which do not meet the 50-percent threshold recognized by the machine. "Shaded naman talaga ang mga oval, merong times na hindi masyado, hindi bilang ng machine, binilang ng RMA team (The ovals are actually shaded, but there are times when it's not fully shaded, so it's not counted by the machine but the RMA team counted it)," he said. He, however, added that there were SBEIs who forgot to record in their minutes the reason why there was a discrepancy. "Medyo nagkulang sila, hindi naglagay remarks, maliwanag sa (They did not follow instruction, they did write on the remarks, it's clear in the) rules, they should state the reason why," he said. On the other hand, Tagle said that the partial results of the RMA cannot materially affect the results of the counting of the elections. The Comelec has already declared 12 of the winning senators while a joint session of the Congress will canvass the votes for president and vice president. - KBK, GMANews.TV