Serious and troubling questions for Comelec!

In a news item last Monday, House Speaker Prospero Nograles has asked the Comelec not to pay Smartmatic yet until such a time as the Congress Joint Oversight Committee can give the public a clean bill of health about the first automated polls. I fully agree with the House Speaker as troubling questions have remained unanswered by both Smartmatic and the Comelec, hence we should withhold any more payments to them until they satisfy us with the answers to our queries.

While we lauded both Smartmatic and the Comelec for the uncanny speed of the May 10th polls, but like the famous Aesop’s fable about the race between the hare and the turtle, it seems that Smartmatic’s first high-speed 48 hours bogged down to a crawl days later and now a week later, we still don’t know the exact figures for this Presidential race. I too have questions for the Comelec and Smartmatic which are begging for answers.

From the way the PCOS machines have remained stuck in neutral, people are starting to have doubts in the automated system. Indeed as we said last week, how could a Jejomar Binay who is unheard of in Cebu end up in second place in the Vice-Presidential race with a total of 413, 975 votes in Cebu City and Cebu Province when his President Erap who is more famous than him garnered only 88,674. That’s a whooping 325,307 difference!!! Mar Roxas got more than a million votes in the whole of Cebu, Binay wouldn’t have won if there wasn’t some kind of hocus pocus in the last polls.

Over the weekend, I finally got my copy of the Comelec results in both Cebu City and Cebu Province direct from the Comelec and what do you know, we found something even more startling, that in both the City of Cebu and in Cebu Province, there was not a single spoil ballot recorded by the Comelec canvass. In short the total number of voters who actually voted tallied exactly to the number of valid ballots counted! If you ask me, this figure is unbelievable especially that we heard of so many reports about spoil or invalid ballots from all over the place? If you ask me, the Comelec has a lot of explaining to do. Methinks this pattern is similar all over the country!

There’s more! In the Province of Cebu, the total number of voters was 1,500,628 and if you added all the votes cast for all who ran for President, the figure would be 1,411,850 and subtracted this number from the 1,500,628, then you will see a figure of 88,778 voters who did not vote for any President! Now isn’t this strange in Presidential elections? In the Vice-Presidential race, the figure is higher at 151,954 who did not vote for a VP! Wow!

You want more puzzling questions for the Comelec to answer in case they do find answers to our questions? First is that in the Province of Cebu, the Comelec reported that the total number of cities/municipalities in Cebu is 51 on the certificate of canvass for gubernatorial and vice-gubernatorial candidates with a total of 1,732,972 million registered voters.

So how come when I looked into the provincial/district certificate of canvass for the presidential and vice-presidential race, there are now 52 municipalities and the total number of registered voters has also risen to 1,900,057. Again, why is there suddenly a different figure for the provincial candidates and another figure for the presidential race? Again we are using the Comelec’s own records and we are begging the Comelec for answers.

Anyway in Cebu Province, the total number of voters on their list is 1,732,972. Now subtract 1,195,396 which are all the votes who ran for governor to all the votes cast, then there are 170,579 who did not vote for any governor. For vice-governor the figure is higher at 295,405 of people who did not vote for any vice-governor. Will anyone from the Comelec explain what’s going on here? No one goes to the polling place and not vote for a president, a governor and vice-governors. This should be of keen interest not only for Sen. Loren Legarda, but also for Mar Roxas!

Meanwhile, NAMFREL has already pointed out that there are some five million disenfranchised voters, not to mention that the PCOS machines rejected many ballots for various reasons… but how come we don’t have a Comelec report on the high percentage of spoiled or rejected ballots?

Meanwhile, the Comelec apparently took out a feature that’s in R.A. 9369 amended by R.A. 8436 where on section 7 it states, (d) “System integrity which ensures physical stability and functioning of the vote recording and counting process and on (E) Provision for voter verified paper audit trail.” Now why was this feature is no longer there when it is in fact part of the law for a voter to have a paper audit trail? Someone in the Comelec violated the Election Law and someone ought to answer for removing this feature that is specifically pointed out in the law. When we voted, we got digital congratulations only. Where is our voter verified paper audit trail? The Comelec should explain to us what really is happening here?

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