No fraud? Poll watchdog doubts joint panel findings

MANILA, Philippines — Poll watchdog Kontra Daya yesterday expressed disbelief over the findings of the Joint Congressional Oversight Committee (JCOC) that there was no electoral fraud in the May 13 midterm polls.

Kontra Daya convenor Danilo Arao said he could not understand how the JCOC could set aside the irregularities that happened not only during election day itself but even during the campaign period.

“We maintain our findings that this is the worst automated elections ever, given the data that we gathered as of May 13. I cannot really understand why the JCOC would ignore such glaring facts,” he noted.

Based on the group’s summary report released on election day, there were malfunctioning vote counting machines (VCMs) and voter registration verification machines that led to the disenfranchisement of voters, delays, rejected ballots, stuck up ballots and/or voter receipts, discrepancies in receipts generated and resorting to manual procedures for verification of voters’ names.

The group also monitored massive vote buying in various parts of the country.

Arao maintained that the JCOC was very much preoccupied with the breakdown of the machines that they conveniently ignored the bigger picture or bigger context in which the allegations of fraud were apparent.

“They just accepted hook, line and sinker the claims of the Comelec regarding the glitches not being able to affect the outcome of the elections,” he said.

Complementing audit

But according to Legal Network for Truthful Elections (Lente) executive director Rona Caritos, the JCOC findings complement the preliminary results of the Random Manual Audit (RMA) conducted on the VCMs.

“It’s not because there is a breakdown of machines, automatic there is already cheating. As for the breakdown, I think it’s normal in a big operation and it just so happened that the number of breakdowns is bigger now,” she said.

Caritos added that based on the audit conducted by the teachers and auditors on the VCMs, there were no signficant discrepancies between the machine count and human count.

She also maintained that based on Lente’s monitoring, cheating was more on “incidents outside the machines.”  

Caritos was referring to vote buying, which the group had observed to be more rampant in the recent polls. 

In RMA, the accuracy of VCMs is being validated by auditing the election returns and the tape receipts from randomly selected polling precincts manually by the teacher-auditors.  

The audit was conducted by the Commissionon Elections, along with Lente, Philippine Statistics Authority, Philippine Institute of Certified Public Accountants and public school teachers from Metro Manila.