MANILA, Philippines—Her name reportedly appeared on the latest voters’ list in Taguig City: Rosalyn Ricafort Galvez, 127 years old.

Galvez was not alone. At least 690 more voters aged 100 years and older have been spotted in city records being prepared for the country’s first automated elections next year, according to a former lawmaker.

And of these centenarians, 621 share the same birthday: Jan. 1, 1901, Etta Rosales disclosed Wednesday.

“Cheating is being done now,” the former Akbayan party-list representative said as she warned that more “polluted lists” of voters could go unchecked despite the shift from manual to computerized elections.

Seeks probe

Rosales spoke during a voter education forum in Quezon City organized by her group, Institute for Political and Electoral Reform (IPER). Some 100 students, local leaders and representatives of nongovernment organizations attended the forum.

Hours before the forum, Rosales said, she sent an urgent letter to the Commission on Elections (Comelec) asking the poll body to investigate “this apparent anomalous list in Taguig.”

Comelec’s legal department director Ferdinand Rafanan, who was also a guest at the forum, said the poll body would immediately act on the matter.

But off-hand, Rafanan said, the entries being questioned by Rosales could have stemmed from a minor glitch in the system.

Common birthday

Rafanan said the common birthday “Jan. 1, 1901,” for example, was probably the default information given by the computer for voters who failed to write down their actual birth dates.

The voter identified as Galvez, who was listed as being born on June 5, 1882, might have actually been born in 1992 and that the discrepancy could have been due to erroneous encoding, the Comelec official added.

Rosales said several Taguig residents approached IPER weeks ago to complain about the difficulties they had encountered when they tried to register as new voters in the city.

“The local election office was asking those who wanted to register for police clearances and other certificates which are actually not needed, according to the law,” she said.

The complainants then did their own research and noticed inconsistencies in the voters’ list that was last used in the 2007 barangay elections, Rosales added.

Taguig election officials could not be immediately reached for comment.

The IPER forum on Wednesday also featured a demonstration of the counting machines to be used in the May 2010 elections.

But lawyer Ibarra Gutierrez III of the University of the Philippines’ College of Law noted that poll watchdogs still have no way of checking the “integrity” of the software to be used for the counting, or whether each of the 82,000 machines to be installed in precincts nationwide would run on the correct software.

Gutierrez also said voters would remain clueless whether the machine counted the entries in the ballot correctly.

The lawyer also asked how the Comelec would keep the data transmission process secure in areas without Internet connections or mobile phone signals.

In his presentation, Rafanan tried to allay such fears. “You can be assured that what we are going to use and what we will implement is in accordance with the law,” he said.

Rafanan said the automated system would be tested up to seven times before election day. Interested voters can participate in the dry-runs to be held at least three days before the May 10 polls, he added.

The system—the software and each of the counting machines—will also be tested prior to election day by a foreign group hired by the Comelec, he said.

Comelec press relations officer Maria Victoria Dulcero said the official ballot would probably be about two feet long.

Voters can select candidates by shading ovals corresponding to the names printed on the ballot. They are to personally feed the ballots into the counting machines.

Machine rejections

To ensure that the machine would not reject the ballot, voters should properly shade the ovals, avoid folding the ballot, and refrain from making unnecessary marks, Dulcero added.

The machine will also reject the ballot if there’s “overvoting” or when more than the maximum number of candidates were marked, Dulcero explained.

For example, if a voter shades 13 ovals for 13 senatorial candidates, the counting machine will disregard all of the voter’s senatorial votes since the race is only for 12 slots, she said.