MANILA — The Commission on Elections (Comelec) reported on Sunday that the ongoing random manual audit (RMA) of votes cast during the May 9 elections has so far matched 99.9 percent of the automated election returns (ERs) for national and selected local elective positions, negating persistent suspicions that the electronic voting system was flawed and susceptible to cheating.
The RMA is a process the Comelec undertakes during elections to determine whether the electronic count of the vote-counting machines (VCMs) under an Automated Election System is accurate based on the manual verification of the ballots.
The RMA, which is being conducted in partnership with the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) and civil society organizations, kicked off last May 10, a day after the nationwide polls. The 45-day manual audit involves 757 ballot boxes from randomly chosen clustered precincts across the country and is being conducted at the Diamond Hotel Manila.
Among the Comelec’s partners in the RMA are election watchdogs Legal Network for Truthful Elections (Lente), National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel), the Philippine Institute of Certified Accountants (Picpa) and the audit professionals group ISACA Manila chapter.
As of May 21, the Comelec said ballots from 128 of the total 757 clustered polling precincts randomly selected for checking have been manually audited and so far, the average overall accuracy rate of the VCM tally with the manual audit was 99.93175 percent.
Per position, the accuracy rate was 99.9721 percent for president; 99.9469 percent for vice president; 99.9759 percent for senator; 99.7954 percent for a party list; 99.958 percent for district representative, and 99.9422 percent for mayor.
According to the Comelec, the accuracy rate was computed “based on the marks and votes cast per position as encoded by the [PSA].”
The audit teams have retrieved 737 of the 757 identified ballot boxes to be audited and have so far finished the manual counting of 128 ballot boxes and are currently auditing 60 others.
“The random manual audit will determine and will bolster our faith in the electoral system. That the machine count is accurate and that the machine counts is what is reflected in the ballots,” Comelec Commissioner Aimee Ferolino, who is in charge of the poll body’s RMA committee, said in a short speech at the launch of the RMA.
“So after the conduct of the RMA, I am sure and I am confident that we can prove once again the accuracy of our machines and that our electoral system is reliable,” she added.
Suspicions of fraud in the conduct of the May 9 elections were initially fueled by malfunctioning VCMs, creating long lines of voters in many areas nationwide.
There were also several online posts raising concern over an alleged consistency in the margin of votes between leading presidential candidate former Sen. Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. and his rival, Vice President Leni Robredo, in the first hours of vote transmission to the Comelec transparency server. (Dona Z. Pazzibugan, Jeannette I. Andrade ©Philippine Daily Inquirer 2022)
