MANILA, Philippines -- Eleven vote scanning and counting machines out of the 7,555 units distributed around Metro Manila were reported to be defective and needed to be replaced after they were tested and sealed on Sunday.

Michael Dioneda, director of the Commission on Elections National Capital Region (Comelec-NCR) office, however, told the Philippine Daily Inquirer, that the number of defective precinct count optical scanning machines (PCOS) was minimal. He assured the public that replacements would be sent Sunday night and then tested before the opening of polling precincts early Monday.

Dioneda said that at least four machines were reported defective in Pateros, three in Las Piñas, and one each in Caloocan City, Pasig City, Quezon City, and in Manila after the testing and sealing processes were completed at the Comelec-NCR office.

All the defective machines, he pointed out, should be replaced. ?The machines automatically shut down and cannot be repaired by the assigned technicians so they will have to be replaced with new machines.?

In Manila, the PCOS machine at the Araullo High School along UN Avenue only read three out of 10 ballots.

School principal Elena Batusan told the Philippine Daily Inquirer that the resident Smartmatic technician did not know how to repair the machine so it had to be replaced. ?We used the same 10 mock ballots in the other 15 machines and they were all read. It is this one machine that refuses to read all 10 ballots,? she explained.

The school principal also noticed that some of the reconfigured compact flash (CF) cards, which were supposed to be assigned to six barangay (villages), only had three barangay written on them. ?We are still trying to clarify that with the Comelec. We just want to make sure that this will not affect the actual voting process,? Batusan remarked.

But apart from the reported 11 machines reported by Dioneda, Supt. Jimmy Tiu, Sta. Mesa Station 8 commander of the Manila Police District (MPD) told the Inquirer that two more PCOS machines turned out to be defective in his area.

One was at the Bacood Elementary School and the other at the Elpidio Quirino High School. But, he said the technicians in the schools have been working to repair them.

A school principal in one of the polling places in Manila who requested anonymity pointed out that the manual process of voting would have been far better than the automation. He commented, ?The election would be easier for the board of election inspectors but it would suffer in terms of credibility.?

?At least we have teachers to guard the tally and everything would be transparent. Here, we only have the machines and there would be no way to check if the results are accurate except for the random manual audit,? he explained.

But, he stressed, to conduct a parallel manual count with the automated process would be additional work for the BEIs and would be impractical at this point.