Committee selects cities, municipalities for 2019 manual audit

Speaking to reporters, Comelec Commissioner and RMA committee head Luie Guia said these cities and municipalities will be announced later at 2 p.m., May 13. (PNA Photo)

MANILA — The Random Manual Audit (RAM) committee on Monday has finally selected the cities and municipalities covered in the RAM process on May 15.

Composed of the Commission on Elections (Comelec), the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), and the Legal Network for Truthful Elections (Lente), the committee stationed at the Philippine International Convention Center (PICC) broke the seal on the computer containing the Automated Random Selection software used to select the cities and municipalities, from which the 715 clustered precincts will be sourced out.

Speaking to reporters, Comelec Commissioner and RMA committee head Luie Guia said these cities and municipalities will be announced later at 2 p.m., May 13.

Following its selection, the committee will then declare the 715 randomly clustered precincts on May 14.

“Previously, the idea is to have three samples per legislative districts but what happened was that instead of having uniformed sample of three, what we did is proportionally allocate the samples,” he told reporters.

This means that if a legislative district has more clustered precinct then it will get more samples selected, the official said.

Guia said the committee hopes to finish the entire RMA process within two weeks.

“What we can commit is we will report what we see. Whatever the implication is, we will report what we see,” he noted.

RMA is a manual examination of ballots that will validate the count of the Vote Counting Machine.

“RMA is required under the law to compare the precinct results doon sa puwedeng basahin ng mata (in what can be read),” Guia said.