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Poll watch group lodges 600 complaints, 280 cases of VCM failure


A poll watch group claimed that its volunteers nationwide recorded over 600 complaints and lodged 280 cases of Vote Counting Machine problems during the May 9 polls. ?

In a meeting with volunteers on Tuesday, Kontra Daya convenor Danilo Arao said, “The reports gathered by Kontra Daya regarding the conduct of May 9 elections is that majority of the report have to do with the malfunctions and errors in the Vote Counting Machines (VCM)."

Kontra Daya is composed of members of the academe, religous groups, information technology professionals and concerned citizens.

“Aside from the VCM problems, we also noticed that the old style of cheating in the form of guns goons and gold, vote buying, military and police presence, we’ve seen such occurences nationwide,” Arao said.

“It’s a reminder to the Comelec that people are still watching and election watchdogs are not seasonal activities that are resurrected every 3 years. We hope to continue the advocacy so that voter accuracy and voter fraud will not happen anymore,” Arao added.

The election-related violations recorded by the group included harrassment, illegal campaigning, and vote-buying.

There were allegedly 54 cases of harrassment and 60 cases of illegal campaigning distributed in some areas.

Data by the Kontra Daya could be accessed through this link: http://reports.votereportph.com/views/map Comelec

Meanwhile, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) said on election day, they had 5,000 replacement VCMs standing by in different areas.

The Comelec said it only had to replace 150 faulty VCMs. However, as of posting time, Kontra Daya recorded over 280 VCM failure cases. 

“I understand that the Comelec had its own monitoring of the VCMs which is understandable but our count initially yields relatively a higher number,” Arao said.

He also questioned why the Comelec kept dealing with Smartmatic when it could have tapped local IT companies for the conduct of Automated Election System (AES).

“We wonder why Comelec is interested in securing a deal with Smartmatic rather than conducting clean and honest elecitons. What’s with smartmatic that would prevent comelec from assigning the conduct of AES to a local company or local IT experts?” Arao asked.

The Dutch-Venezuelan company Smartmatic was first tapped in the May 2010 national elections, supplying Comelec with what were then called Precinct Count Optical Scan Machines (PCOS).

“We are so dependent on the Smartmatic. And we’ve had a not so good experience with Smartmatic in 2010 and in 2013. And the same problems with the vote counting machine are still very much apparent up to now,” Arao said.

He made it clear that the group is not against automated elections per se but how they were conducted in the country in the past two elections.

Arao noted the high incidence of disenfranchisement, where voters could not find their names on the voter’s lists despite having registered their biometrics with Comelec. Although the voter turnout for the May 2016 polls is relatively higher than in previous elections, Arao said it could have been higher.

“We think that there is disenfranchisement and a negative effect in terms of the actual results in the voting.

Had the conduct of the election been systematic and more transparent we would have wanted something that is higher,” Arao said.

“We would want to repeat these assertions so that there could be some lessons learned when we conduct another round of automated elections three years from now,” he added. — VVP, GMA News

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