Philippine 2010 Election Result

Comelec: Poll results known in 3 days

The results of the country’s first automated general elections will be known within three days.

This was announced by Commission on Elections (Comelec) spokesman James Jimenez after business groups said they feared the new system would fail.

The Philippines has brought in the nationwide automated system to replace the laborious manual system that took weeks to tabulate results, but influential business groups have called for a manual count as a backup.

In a statement Wednesday, the Management Association of the Philippines urged the Comelec to adopt a parallel nationwide manual count for the president and vice president to “mitigate, if not eliminate, the skepticism of many about the credibility of the automated election system and the results that it will deliver.”

The Comelec is prepared to shift to a manual count if ballot-counting machines fail to function in up to 30 percent of more than 76,300 precincts nationwide during the May 10 polls, said Jimenez.

A failure to elect a successor to President Arroyo by the time she is supposed to step down on June 30 is “almost inconceivable,” he said.

“We are looking at two to three days for the release of the national data ... but as far as the proclamation of president and vice president (is concerned), you have to wait for Congress,” Jimenez told a forum by the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines.

Under the Constitution, the Senate and the House of Representatives must convene not later than 30 days after the elections to officially count votes for the president and vice president and proclaim the winners.

Voters also will be electing senators, congressmen, provincial, city and municipal officials on May 10. These votes will also be counted using the automated system.

Random manual audit

Comelec Commissioner Rene Sarmiento said yesterday the random manual audit of ballots should be done after the proclamation of candidates so as not to delay the election process.

“It should be after. If you do it before proclamation, then objections, challenges can be raised. If it happens, the process and proclamation of candidates will be delayed. It might defeat the purpose of full automation. That’s the concern of the Comelec,” Sarmiento told reporters.

Sarmiento said they are set to promulgate their resolution soon after reducing the report of the technical working group.

Electoral reform groups have asked the Comelec to conduct a wider manual audit of ballots before the proclamation of election winners because a limited one would cast doubt on the results of the automated polls.

Poll watchdog groups have been pushing for the random manual audit before the proclamation, saying doing it after the proclamation would render it useless.

Comelec critics claimed that in the event that there is a discrepancy between the results of the automated and manual count, the rest of the ballot boxes should be opened and be counted manually so winners can be proclaimed.

Sarmiento said that they have already decided to increase the number of precincts to be subjected to random manual audit.

“Now we have increased the audit to five, so it’s a higher number and make the precincts to be audited more representative,” Sarmiento said.

The random manual audit will be conducted by the Board of Election Inspectors (BEI) not belonging to the selected precinct.

The Poll Automation Law stipulates the conduct of manual audit in a single precinct per legislative district, randomly selected by the Comelec.

A ballot box from the selected precinct will be audited to check if the ballots in it had been counted properly by the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machine.