Binay belittles Roxas lead in OAV

Finally, after 1-and-a-half session days worth of debate riddled with late beginnings and several breaks, the joint congressional canvass committee on Thursday shut up and actually did their main job of canvassing the votes for president and vice president.

This however didn’t come without a compromise---they decided to canvass first the certificates of canvass where elections were held manually without the use of the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines---mostly from the overseas and some local absentee voting, representing around 100 of the 278 Certificates of Canvass (COCs), which could be worth around half a million votes.

All but 2 COCs from the Overseas Absentee Voting were done manually---only overseas Filipin workers (OFWs) in Singapore and Hong Kong got to use PCOS machines.

The compromise came after around 4 hours of debates on security features of the automated election system.

At 6: 52 pm, Compostela Valley Congressman Manuel "Way Kurat' Zamora reprised his 2004 role of carrying the ballot box with COCs from the shelves in the holding area to the examination table where the committee members and watchers and lawyers of the candidates had a chance to examine the documents.

The process almost stalled again after some candidates’ lawyers protested the absence of Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) personnel who will authenticate the signatures of ambassadors or consuls who prepared the COCs.

A bolt cutter was used to cut the 3 padlocks and heavy sealing of the ballot boxes.

Ballot boxes are being opened in the order they were received.

First to be canvassed were the ballot boxes from Laos, Guam, Brunei and Papua New Guinea and Thailand

The Liberal Party tandem of Noynoy Aquino and Mar Roxas led the initial canvass, prompting the camp of Roxas’ chief rival, Makati Mayor Jejomar Binay to stress that while they expect Roxas to lead the OAV round, it only represents a small posrtion of the votes cast. The OAV results have already been reported in media.

“We expect Mar Roxas to lead," Binay said. "But we must remember that total registered OAV voters is around 560,000 (around 1% of total registered voters) with initial reports of only 25-30% turnout.”