Random manual recount of votes

It’s all very clear already who are the senatorial candidates who won in the race for the 12 seats. The Commission on Elections (Comelec) would like, however, to formally proclaim the new set of senators all together, at the same time. The Comelec expects to complete today (Friday) at the earliest the canvassing of election returns (ERs) all over the country.

This is the last ceremonial function to be undertaken by the National Board of Canvassers (NBOC) headed by Comelec Chairman George Erwin Garcia, who reported 81.65 percent turnout of the over 68 million registered voters.

Winding down the just concluded May 12, 2025 midterm elections, accredited elections watchdogs have only kind words of congratulations for the Garcia-led Comelec for a job well done. The National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL) gave an 80 percent grade to the seven-man Comelec. That is as far as no major incident or controversy and scandal that could otherwise lead to a “failure of elections” or tarnish the final outcome of the just concluded polls.

“The attitude of Comelec is very different. They are very open to suggestions and recommendations,” NAMFREL chairman Lito Averia said at the Kapihan sa Manila Bay news forum last Wednesday. On the other hand, Averia could only give a “passing mark” of 70 percent to the new automated counting machines (ACMs) procured by the Comelec from Miru Systems of South Korea.

Averia said NAMFREL’s advocacy and mission of “offering solutions” to ensure the holding of honest, orderly and peaceful elections, or H.O.P.E. will continue even with the new ACMs deployed by Comelec’s new service provider. Averia believed many of the complaints – from ACM glitches to delayed transmission of ERs to the transparency servers – were part of the so-called “birth pains” of the Comelec’s newly tapped service provider of our country’s automated election system (AES).

The Miru ACMs replaced those provided by Comelec’s former service provider Smartmatic Philippines Inc. At the close of polling precincts last Monday night, the Comelec reported only 311 ACMs were replaced from the 16,000 contingency machines provided by Miru in case of malfunctions and other technical issues in the operation of the machines.

“Actually, we have a big problem with the transmission of the votes. If we gather the problems regarding ACM, it does not compare to the problem with the transmission,” Averia noted.

Established in 1983, the 50,000-strong volunteers from NAMFREL were among the three accredited election watchdogs of the Comelec. The other two are the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) and the Legal Network for Truthful Elections (LENTE). As such, the NAMFREL, PPCRV and LENTE were all given access to the Comelec’s transparency servers that received official ER copies from all polling precincts nationwide.

Aside from the three election watchdogs and the Comelec-designated dominant majority political party and dominant minority political party, the media outlets represented by the Kapisanan ng mga Brodkaster ng Pilipinas (KBP) were also provided access to the Comelec’s transparency servers. Results of the election are posted on the Comelec website in real time.

Early Tuesday, media outlets observed that partial, unofficial results reflected in the Comelec media server showed a decrease in votes despite the continuous increase in the ERs transmitted. It was later discovered that transmissions sent from certain precincts were duplicated during consolidation in the Comelec’s server. The alleged discrepancy occurred because no program was in place to clean the duplicate data as a result of the processing, the Comelec explained.

Perhaps, the huge volume of hacking attempts monitored from May 11 to 14 targeted to put down the Comelec website and the election results site could have caused such technical issues. Comelec spokesman John Rex Laudiangco disclosed their IT teams were able “to mitigate” as many as 1.45 million hacking attempts out of legitimate 76.8 million “visits.” And the rest of these attempts were considered DIDOS, or “deliberated denial of service,” Laudiangco added. These DIDOS are a way of overcrowding the system to prevent legitimate users from viewing the site, he explained.

Former Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) undersecretary Alexander Ramos expressed relief on the Comelec’s much improved anti-hacking system “to mitigate” or neutralize such cyberattacks. Despite these hacking attempts and glitches of the ACMs, Ramos declared last Monday’s national and local elections were “hack-free.”

When he was also concurrently the executive director of DICT’s Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center (CICC), Ramos helped set up the Threat Monitoring Center in Quezon City, jointly manned by Comelec and DICT cyber experts. Ramos, however, submitted his courtesy resignation to President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. (PBBM) last March.

A globally recognized information technology expert, Ramos returned to his former advocacy on electoral reforms and as source code analyst. Ramos joined us at the Kapihan sa Manila Bay news forum the other day with the NAMFREL chairman in a post-mortem of the midterm elections.

Averia and Ramos were one in expressing their concern on the time gap of delay of transmission of ERs to the transparency servers. There was almost two hours of delay, Ramos noted, when the Comelec finally started to transmit the first electronic ERs after the seven o’clock in the evening close of all polling precincts.

“We’re waiting for technical explanations,” Ramos said.

“The problem was with the transmission as it includes the election results which, if we will not be able to provide to the public, would cast a question on the polls,” Averia pointed out.

“May mga malikot ang isip, many are likely to speculate that there’s cheating going on,” the NAMFREL chief rued.

Both Ramos and Averia, however, dared these suspicious minds to channel their efforts to the ongoing Random Manual Audit (RMA) of these electronically transmitted election results.

The RMA could also be the response to those who are calling for a manual recount of votes, the Comelec chief announced.