Comelec disowns fault in printing of ballots

Ballot for 2016 Philippine election (Twitter photo).

MANILA—The Commission on Elections (Comelec) disowns the recent fault in the printing of official ballots for the May polls.

Comelec Chairman Juan Andres Bautista said the inadvertent deletion of the name of the political party, People’s Reform Party (PRP) of presidential aspirant, Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago, can be blamed on Smartmatic.

“It is the supplier of the ballot faces,” the poll body official said.

He was asked if Smartmatic will be held accountable, Bautista answered, “Why focus on cases? I want to focus first on making sure that things are done. To me, fault finding will lead us nowhere.

What’s important is we have solutions.”

With this, Bautista said they were already preparing to resume the printing of the official ballots, starting with the ballots for the overseas absentee voting (OAV) to be followed by the ones that will be used in the May 9 polls.

The Comelec is looking to finish the printing of the 56,772,230 ballots by April 25.

The NPO will be printing a total of 54,363,844 official ballots for local voters and another 1,189,350 overseas voters; as well as another 281,316 for the Pre-Election Logical Accuracy Test (PreLAT), and 937,720 for the Final Testing and Sealing.

On Monday, the printing of the ballots stopped at the National Printing Office (NPO) after learning that name of the political party was missing, it should be placed after Santiago’s name.