Congressional probe on poll glitches, other woes set on June 4, Pimentel says

The Joint Congressional Oversight Committee on the Automated Election System (JCOC-AES) will conduct on June 4 a probe on the glitches and other problems encountered during the May 13 polls, Senator Aquilino Pimentel III said Wednesday.

Pimentel, who co-chairs the JCOC-AES, said he would have wanted the hearing to be held earlier but his counterparts in the House of Representatives requested for a later date.

“JCOC-AES (will conduct the hearing). House ang nag-request na June 4 na lang. I wanted earlier,” he said in a text message to GMA News Online.

Pimentel earlier said the glitches were enough to call for a congressional investigation.

“Why are we still having all these glitches? Cannot Comelec (Commission on Elections) anticipate them?” Pimentel said in an earlier text message to reporters.

Senator Panfilo Lacson, for his part, said Wednesday the inquiry should be conducted as soon as Congress resumes session.

He said he wanted the Commission on Elections to address such as shift from a simultaneous transmission of data at the precinct level as practiced before to a transparency server which in turn transmits simultaneously to the authorized recipients of and which caused the stoppage of the dissemination of data for some seven hours.

Lacson also wanted to know who controls the transparency server; what is the purpose of the transparency server in the first place except to act as a traffic controller; and why did the Comelec procured low quality SD cards.

During Election Day, some 1,000 SD cards had issues resulting in the malfunction of vote counting machines.

Also, the unofficial count was delayed after the application responsible for pushing out the results from the Comelec transparency server to third-party organizations suffered a glitch on Monday shortly after the polls closed.

Another error early Tuesday caused a dip in the transparency survey results. The number of election returns processed was already at 92.89% as of 5:20 a.m. but this went down to 49.76% at 6:21 a.m.

Comelec Commissioner Marlon Casquejo said this was merely a “java error,” and that it affected all media networks and organizations sourcing data from the transparency server. — RSJ, GMA News