Congress resumes canvassing after 3-hour delay

Lawmakers sitting as National Board of Canvassers (NBOC) on Monday evening resumed the checking and counting of votes for president and vice-president after three hours of grilling officials of technology provider Smartmatic. The first to be canvassed was the electronically transmitted certificates of canvass from La Union province. Before the actual canvassing, Smartmatic officials were allowed to correct the erroneous entry on the number of registered voters in the server set up in the House of Representatives to accept the electronically transmitted election results from provinces and urbanized cities. Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile bared last week the wrong entry that he said he found out when he led the initialization of consolidation and canvassing server (CCS) at the close of polling hours on May 10, election day. Instead of the 51 million registered voters, the figure was bloated to 256,733,195. Smartmatic has blamed "program error" for the overblown figure of registered voters during a hearing. - Amita Legaspi/KBK, GMANews.TV