PCOS machine breakdowns reported

CEBU, Philippines - As feared even prior to yesterday’s election, breakdowns of Precinct Count Optical Scan machines delayed the automated voting process in various precincts in Cebu City.

In the Camp Lapu-Lapu Elementary School in Barangay Apas, two PCOS machines, in clustered precinct numbers 11 and 12, experienced a breakdown which delayed voters for an average of two hours.

The PCOS unit in precinct number 11 shut down at least thrice before noon yesterday.  The first breakdown was experienced at 8 a.m. The problem started when the machine refused to accept ballots due to a paper jam. Technicians were, however, able to solve the problem after lunch.

Other paper jam incidents were reported in three PCOS machines in the Don Vicente Rama Elementary School in Basak-San Nicolas and one PCOS unit in the Kamputhaw Elementary School in barangay Kamputhaw.

The paper problems of machines in clustered precinct number 284, 285 and 292 in Don Vicente Rama Elementary School were solved through pushing the ballots further into the machine to free some space inside.

The cause of the PCOS failure reported in precinct number 420 in the Kamputhaw Elementary School was not identified, but technicians immediately rushed to the area to solve the problem.

In the Guadalupe Elementary School, members of the Commission and Elections and Smartatic attempted to replace the PCOS unit of clustered precinct number 355.

The new PCOS was delivered and installed at 3:35 p.m., more than three hours after the machine registered a “critical error” on its screen.

But when the Comelec and Smartmatic technicians installed the new PCOS, the machines would still not function properly.  A little later, when the Compact Flash card was tested five times and still failing, they found out that the problem was with the card.

Sherwin Tacoloy, the PCOS supervisor in the Guadalupe Elementary School, said that when the card was tested the first time, its memory registered zero vote counts when there were already 214 votes counted prior to its breakdown.

Tacoloy immediately called the Smartmatic Support Center to report the problem and was told that the CF card needs to be downloaded again.

Tacoloy said that they will check with the support center if the memory in the old CF card can be still be retrieved.

This, however, did not delay the voting process for as long as the Board of Election Inspectors continued accepting voters inside and allowed voters to manually drop their ballots to the box.

A total of 5,561 PCOS machines were delivered to Central Visayas with 408 spare units for contingencies.  (FREEMAN NEWS)