Democracy biggest winner in automated polls - RP envoy to US

WASHINGTON – Ambassador Willy Gaa said his candidate and the candidate of all Filipinos – democracy – won Monday’s general elections.

Gaa was in a happy mood as aides briefed him on election developments trickling in from Manila while he watched the manual count of overseas absentee ballots at the Philippine embassy in Washington.

He said indications were that the polls back home were relatively free and fair and the country’s first fully automated elections generally successful. “All Filipinos can be proud of that,“ he said. 

Consul General Domingo Nolasco, chairman of the Special Board of Canvassers for the US, said of 6,958 voters from 10 states and the District of Colombia registered to vote at the embassy 1,723 cast their ballots, a 25-percent turnout compared with a 16-percent turnout in the 2007 senatorial elections.

Other voters were registered to vote at the Philippine consulates general in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Honolulu and New York.

The Overseas Absentee Voting Secretariat said nearly 600,000 Filipino absentee voters throughout the world registered to vote in Monday’s elections, about 10 percent of them residing in the US and Canada.

It was not immediately known what the overall turnout was. 

The first result of the manual count here was read out at 11:15 a.m. Washington time on Monday at about the same time the Comelec in Manila was closing shop for the day with more than 50 percent of the votes counted. 

It may have been the first fully automated elections in the Philippines where counting of the votes was done electronically, but Philippine missions abroad had to count the absentee votes manually and it was laborious and time-consuming.  

By midnight the manual count at the embassy was only two-thirds completed.