Audit shows no indication of poll fraud, says Comelec

Amid allegations of poll fraud, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) on Friday said that updated partial results from the Random Manual Audit (RMA) prove that there was no systematic rigging of the 2010 automated elections. Comelec Commissioner Lucenito Tagle said that RMA results from 970 polling precincts showed that there was only a "small deficiency" in the electronic and manual count of election results. He likewise said that the supposed deficiencies were isolated cases. "It’s scattered, almost across the country," said the commissioner, who is co-chair of the Technical Working Group for the RMA. 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, or 1,145 precincts nationwide. The random selection of the precincts that were audited was conducted at the Philippine International Convention Center (PICC) in Pasay City on election day, May 10. The selection was done manually by randomly picking precinct numbers from a large raffle drum. On the other hand, the audit itself was conducted by Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV), the Comelec's citizens' arm, which Tagle said is expected to finish the RMA report soon. "By next week, the PPCRV may come up with the RMA results because that will be submitted to Congress," he said. Earlier, the PPCRV released a report saying that 29 out of the 43,035 or 0.07 percent of clustered precincts nationwide — or about 17,000 votes — do "not exactly match" the transmitted results. The 43,035 clustered precincts constitute 56.4 percent of the total number of clustered precincts nationwide. However, the PPCRV also said that they found no indication of poll fraud because there was no "pattern" in the incosistencies in the election results. - TJD, GMANews.TV