Comelec: May 13 elections successful despite glitches

FILE: TESTING AND SEALING OF VCMs. A woman feeds her sample ballot to the vote-counting machine (VCM) during the testing and sealing of VCM in the municipality of Kalayaan, Pagasa Island in Palawan, in preparation for the 2019 mid-term elections on May 13. Comelec officials were present during the event. (PNA photo by Joey O. Razon)

MANILA — The Commission on Elections (Comelec) on Tuesday said the recently-concluded May 2019 National and Local Elections (NLE) is successful despite the presence of several glitches involving vote counting machines (VCMs).

Comelec chairman Sheriff Abas asked the people for their understanding after problems, such as defective secure digital (SD) cards and some of the machines that malfunctioned, delayed the opening of some polling centers.

“For these, I am asking for the people’s understanding. But on our part, we still think our elections are successful because the rate of the defective equipment is low,” Abas said in a press briefing.

The poll body head is referring to the 961 out of the 85,769 VCMs or 1.1 percent that were found defective and the 1,665 (1.9 percent) SD cards that have been replaced last Monday.

The figures are higher than the 801 VCMs and 120 SD cards that were replaced in the 2016 polls.

On the other hand, Commissioner Marlon Casquejo also believed that the May 2019 polls is successful although there were issues reported.

“Despite these glitches that we have since it’s less than 1 percent or 1 percent of the entire more than 85,000 clustered precincts we can say that the elections is successful,” he added.

Meanwhile, Casquejo explained that the delay during the transmission of results from their transparency server Monday night was a case of bottlenecking in the data inflow.

“Under normal situations, that gate should remain open. But when the results came in bulks, there was a bottleneck. There was a delay in the picking up of the results,” he said. The problems in the server were resolved Tuesday morning.

At the same time, the Comelec official assured the public that the results of the mid-term elections will not be affected.

“One thing here is we want to make sure to the public that the results of the elections in the transparency server were not affected,” Casquejo added.

The transparency server is located at the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) headquarters in Manila, where media outlets get their data for the quick counts.