No poll fraud – Namfrel

MANILA, Philippines - The National Citizen’s Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel) maintained that there was no indication of irregularities in the May 9 elections based on the ongoing random manual audit (RMA).

In a press briefing yesterday, Namfrel alternate chairperson Tammy Lipana said that Namfrel did not see any indication of vote-padding in the RMA although the audit is not yet complete. 

Lipana also noted that Namfrel saw that some ballots were clean.

“There were many (ballots) with no marks, it’s really very clean… No vote is not unusual, maybe they just don’t want to vote. Even for the unopposed some didn’t vote,” she added.

As required by the poll automation law, the Comelec, Namfrel and Philippine Statistics Office conduct RMA to validate the accuracy of the vote counting machines (VCMs). 

RMA teams are counting the votes manually from 715 polling precincts and will compare them with the automated count of the VCMs. Of the 715 precincts, 353 have been audited.   

Based on the partial report, there is an average overall accuracy of 99.74 percent for the VCMs. The audit covered the positions of president, vice president, congressmen, senators and mayors.

For president, the accuracy rate was 99.71 percent; vice president, 99.71 percent; congressmen, 99.78 percent; governor, 99.73 percent; and mayor, 99.75 percent. 

The differences were due to the appreciation of the shading of the oval between the VCM and the RMA.