THE COMMISSION on Elections last March 7 assured voters that the vote counting machines for the May 9 national elections were “accurate, verifiable and transparent.”

Comelec executive assistant Kriselle Balmes said the machines have an audit log and can provide on-screen verification that will allow voters to check their ballot entries.

“Ballots [can be] identified by the machines and are rejected if fake or invalid, previously scanned, for another precinct, or with ambiguous marks,” Balmes said in a forum at the Beato Angelico Gallery.

The “voter verifiable audit trail,” a new feature of the machine, enables the printing of a receipt containing the list of entries on each ballot. However, only the on-screen verification feature will be used for the upcoming elections, Balmes said.

There are 54,363,844 registered voters and 92,509 election-day precincts, according to Comelec. Each precinct will have a counting machine.

Paolo Domondon, representative of the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) that has approximately 17,000 volunteers, discussed his group’s voter-education efforts. “We try to create a strong link between how your vote affects your own life,” he said.

Domondon enumerated the three major advocacies of PPCRV namely: voter education, poll watching and parallel unofficial tallying of votes.

The forum, which had the theme “Make a choice, have a voice,” was part of the Aktiboto University-wide voter education initiative, and was held in coordination with Ideas That Matter, an organization of advertising students from the College of Fine Arts and Design.

READ
UST to adjust academic calendar

LEAVE A REPLY

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.