612 towns, cities to undergo random manual audit

Random manual audits (RMA) for the May 9 polls will be conducted in 612 towns and cities nationwide on Tuesday to determine if the votes cast were accurately recorded by the counting machines, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) said.

Among the provinces which were randomly selected for the RMA are Metro Manila, Bulacan, Nueva Ecija, Pampanga, Tarlac, Zambales, Albay, Masbate, Cebu, Negros Oriental, Bukidnon, Misamis Oriental, Sultan Kudarat and Basilan, according to a list obtained by GMA News Online.

The RMA was supposed to be conducted in Tubo (Abra), Busuanga and Cuyo (Palawan), Jones (Isabela) and Wao (Lanao del Sur) but the Comelec replaced these with other towns in the said provinces because the municipalities concerned were either declared areas of concern or isolated.

The 715 clustered precincts in areas that will hold the RMA will also be known on Tuesday, said Comelec Commissioner Luie Tito Guia, head of the poll body's RMA committee.

The RMA will begin at 8 a.m. at the canvassing centers of the municipalities and cities.

"At the ground level, we hope to finish by tomorrow (Tuesday) din basta't nagsimula at makuha ang mga ballot boxes, it's going to be finished at the end of the day. But ang rule kasi namin, if there are 10 variances (discrepancy between manual and VCM count) in the entire precinct, we will elevate that for validation and verification," Guia said.

"Ang variance means parang hindi nagkatugma ang bilang, which could be because of how a human eye can appreciate the mark. Eh 'di ba ang machine eksakto 'yan. If it sees like this or that, it will count it as a vote. The human eye could not have that precise appreciation," he added.

Elective positions covered by the RMA are president, vice president, members of the House of Representatives, governor and mayor.

he Poll Automation Law only requires an RMA for one precinct per legislative district.

Each audit team will have three people, similar to the composition of a board of election inspectors (BEIs), who will do the manual count.

There will also be two "verifiers" who will look at how the ballots were marked, and see how these marks were appreciated by the machine.

The process will still be performed in front of watchers from political parties and civil society groups.

For the 2013 polls, the RMA reported that the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines had a 99.97 percent accuracy rate after finding only 237 variances in the 1,016,860 votes audited by poll watchdog Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV).

Only 234 clustered precincts were subjected to RMA in the previous elections. —ALG, GMA News