Mock polls in Quezon City

MANILA, Philippines--The mock elections held Saturday at the New Era Elementary School in Quezon City to pilot test the newly acquired precinct counting optical scanning (PCOS) machine was successful.

Of the 50 ballots cast by the voters from the Barangay New Era (Constitution Hills),  only four were rejected by the counting machine due to several factors, including the very light shading of the circles in the document.

The voting started around 8 a.m. when 10 of the 50 pre-selected residents of the village cast their votes. Others were led to a holding area while the voting was ongoing in the other room.

Lawyer Ronald Allan Sindo, Commission on Elections (Comelec) officer in the second district of Quezon City, said they have not encountered any glitches with the PCOS machines.

"The only problem we had was the crowd management," Sindo said, referring to the earlier argument with several private poll watch observers and some members of the media.

 Sindo and some members of the poll watchdog, the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV), had argued with TV crew and cameramen of different media outfits who went to cover the event but were not allowed inside the polling precinct.

Sindo,however, later allowed the photographers and TV cameramen to record on video the voters lining up to get ballots using a special marker given by the three board of election inspectors manning the precinct.

Aside from the PPRCV, representatives of Smartmatic, other poll watchdogs such as Bantay Daya, members of the National Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel) also attended the mock elections. Namfrel has a pending petition to do a parallel count during the elections.

The voting ended around 9:25 a.m. and was transmitted 10 a.m. to the canvassing area inside the Albert Hall of the Quezon City Hall.

It took the machine about one minute 17 seconds to transmit the information read by the PCOS machine to the personal computer at Albert Hall.