Comelec resolved ‘mislabeled’ cast ballots in Zamboanga, Dumaguete —PPCRV

The Commission on Elections has already resolved the “mislabeled” ballots in some precincts in Zamboanga City and Dumaguete City, the  Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) said Friday.

PPCRV spokesperson Ana Singson said the Comelec clarified that the discrepancy between the number of registered voters who cast their votes and the ballots cast in the precincts was due to an error when putting the ballots into the automated counting machines. Hence, the ballots could have been scanned more than once per voter.

But the Comelec labeled the scanned ballots, or the total number of valid, rejected, and returned ballots, as the actual ballots cast.

“Sometimes the machines will reject the ballot. So it’s already scanned once, and then you put it in again, it’s scanned again. So it’s actually scanned twice for one voter,” said Singson in a press briefing.

“So the error was that the data they showed, they mislabeled it. They showed the data that was scanned when they should have shown the data of the actual valid number of ballots. That has since been adjusted,” she added.

PPCRV raised concerns on Thursday after “a lot” of votes were coming from Zamboanga City and Dumaguete City.

For instance, the election watchdog noted from Comelec’s website on May 13 that a precinct in Dumaguete had 930 registered voters and 814 were able to vote. But it also showed that there were 956 votes cast.  

The mislabeled cast ballots had been corrected on May 15 and that the number of voters who voted and valid ballots cast was actually 814.

The PPCRV has already received the final batch of transmitted votes on Thursday.

Singson said that they have already received 99.12% of transmitted election returns from 92,808 precincts nationwide.

“So after today, we won’t make any updates to the unofficial parallel counts…I have to say this is one of the highest that we have gotten and very quickly too,” she said.—AOL, GMA Integrated News

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