NAMFREL pushes for hybrid system with manual precinct vote counting in next polls
MANILA, Philippines — Amid issues on vote counting machines used for this year’s polls and talks of its replacement for the next, a group is recommending that the country pursue manual counting to account for election votes instead.
National Citizens' Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL) national chairman and former Commission on Elections (Comelec) Commissioner Augusto Lagman is suggesting the country should have a “hybrid system.”
Under this, voters will use a manual election system at the precinct-level that will also be tallied manually, while the automated system via the machines will be used for canvassing to make things faster.
“After the manual precinct counting, the election returns or ER should be transmitted from the precinct’s laptop to the city or municipality canvassing center but that election return should also be immediately uploaded to a public website,” Lagman said during the Pandesal Forum held on Wednesday at the Kamuning Bakery Cafe in Quezon City.
However, Lagman said a manual count at the precinct-level would take five to 12 more hours.
Under the current system, voters feed their ballots into the VCMs and a vote receipt will be printed afterwards to allow each individual to check if the machine read their votes correctly.
At the end of the voting period, an election return is printed out by the voting machine that should reflect the tally of the votes that each candidate garnered from the precinct.
The ER would then be processed by the board of canvassers starting at the city or municipality level and then the provincial board, each producing a certificate of canvass before it is sent to the national board of canvassers.
But Lagman said the current process is not transparent because the precinct-counting is automated and it is “very vulnerable to tampering by an insider.”
“You don’t see anything. Once pinasok natin ‘yung balota natin dun, wala na tayong makikita. Lalabas na lang ‘yung resulta,” Lagman said.
(You don’t see anything. Once we feed our ballots into the machines, we don’t see what happens. The results just come out.)
Just a few hours into election day last month, over a thousand of VCMs and some SD cards already encountered technical difficulties, which raised some eyebrows as it cast doubt on the credibility of the machine and SD Card replacements.
READ: Voters, poll watchers question glitches as broken machines stall long lines at precincts
For the next elections, the Comelec is considering renting out VCMs instead of buying new machines as a cost-saving measure.
But aside from manual counting at the precinct-level believed to be more accurate, Lagman said it would also be more cost-friendly as it requires less equipment and logistics problems, minimal training would be required of those in the electoral board, and the possibility of cheating would be lower.
The software used may be open-source to allow the public to monitor the votes on their own and the laptops used for every election period may be replaced every three years.
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