DLSU academicians support automated polls

MANILA, Philippines - Academicians and researchers who reviewed the national elections last May called for the continued use of automated elections in the country, saying the system “provides more accountable and transparent polls.”

A random manual audit (RMA) of this year’s senatorial race – which involved matching the automated and manual count of 1,016,860 votes from randomly picked 234 clustered precincts – showed that the automated count was 99.97 percent accurate, De La Salle University’s liberal arts dean Julio Teehankee said in a forum at DLSU’s Manila campus last week.

The forum, which discussed the “gains and remaining issues” of automated elections in the country, was hosted by advocacy group Democracy Watch.

The RMA of the first automated elections in 2010 was 99.6 percent accurate, he said.

Teehankee added that the Consortium on Electoral Reforms and Ateneo de Manila University’s Ateneo Fact-Check both heralded the 2013 elections as being credible despite minor technical glitches that both groups acknowledged were addressed by the Commission on Elections.