Comelec to put up TV screen monitors at canvassing centers

Isang maganda balita mula sa COMELEC. Maglalagay daw sila ng mga TV screens sa mga canvassing centers upang mas mabantayan hindi lamang ng mga poll watchers kundi pati natin ang resulta ng mga boto habang ito ay nagaganap.

Nakakatuwang isipin na gumawa sila ng ganitong hakbang upang masigurado ng mamayang Pilipino na mas magiging maayos at mabilis ang magaganap na Poll Automation Election sa ating bansa. Ang dapat na lamang nating abangan sa araw ng ika-8 ng Mayo ay ang resulta ang ihahalal na bagong Pangulo at mga bagong opisyal ng Pilipinas.

Para sa kabuuang detalye, minarap ko ng kopyahin ang artikulo o maari kayong bumisita sa Politics Inquirer.

Watchers and poll watchdogs will be able to see the canvassed results as they come in on May 10 through large screen monitors and projectors that the Commission on Elections has agreed to install at all canvassing centers.

MANILA, Philippines—Watchers and poll watchdogs will be able to see the canvassed results as they come in on May 10 through large screen monitors and projectors that the Commission on Elections has agreed to install at all canvassing centers.
The Comelec agreed to put up the monitors after representatives of the Makati Business Club and information technology groups met with Election Commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal on Friday to discuss their proposals on the monitoring of the canvassed results of the May 10 automated national elections.

Their suggestions were aimed at ensuring that the transmitted tallies reflect the ballots fed into the Precinct Count Optical Scan machines, which are being used for the first time in nationwide elections to scan ballots and count the votes for the various candidates.

The PCOS machines—82,200 were ordered from Smartmatic TIM Corp.— will read and record the votes cast using machine-readable ballots. At the end of the voting day, the machines will print 30 election returns and transmit the results to various servers for canvassing and consolidation.

Aside from putting up large screen monitors, the election stakeholders also urged the Comelec to allow parallel manual count of ballots for the presidential, vice-presidential, and mayoralty races.

Larrazabal said the Comelec agreed to place large-screen projectors at the 1,637 municipal canvassing centers, which will show the results from the precincts after the polling ends at 6 p.m. of May 10.

The Comelec, he said, does not have to buy projectors since most of the municipalities have one.

“Or they can borrow from NGOs (non-government organizations). We will check with the local government units if they have it,” he said.

Gus Lagman, a convenor of transparentelections.org who attended the Friday meeting, said they were glad that the Comelec agreed to their proposal to place large screens at the canvassing points. This, he said, will make the canvassing more transparent.

“We are trying to help the Comelec and make elections credible. Our objective is not to criticize Comelec,” he said.

The Comelec, he said, has yet to agree to hold manual partial count of the votes to be done by the Board of Election Inspectors before the proclamation of the candidates.

The Comelec, last week, thumbed down the proposal, saying this would slow down the canvassing and the proclamation of winners.

The MBC and its allied groups said the manual parallel count for president, vice-president, and mayors, will only take 3-5 hours, depending on the size of the precinct.

It would not delay the announcement of results and would discourage losing politicians from thinking that the machines were rigged.

About 50 million Filipinos have registered to vote in the 76,000 precincts using counting machines that would tabulate and transmit results electronically.

If the Comelec approves the parallel manual count, it could do away with the random manual audit of the ballots, Lagman said.

He pointed out that there is no legal barrier to the parallel manual count. “It's not in the law, but it's not prohibited,” he said.

Should the Comelec agree to their proposal for a manual count, the civil society organizations would be willing to help the poll body craft the rules, Lagman said.