Comelec. INQUIRER.net
MANILA, Philippines — The random manual audit (RMA) of votes cast for the May 9 polls has so far yielded a nearly 100-percent accuracy rate, an election watchdog said.
“The last preliminary accuracy result that we released is around 99.96 [percent]. Preliminary pa lang po ‘yan [That’s only preliminary] but we will release a final report for the record,” Legal Network for Truthful Elections (Lente) representative Atty. Helen Gaido told reporters.
This, as the Commission on Elections (Comelec) on Monday began the reverse deployment of ballot boxes used in the RMA to their respective points of origin.
Lente is among the Comelec’s election watchdog partners in this year’s RMA.
The RMA is a process the Comelec undertakes during elections to determine whether the automated count of the vote counting machines (VCMs) under an Automated Election System is accurate based on the manual verification of the said count.
There are 757 clustered precincts randomly selected for the RMA for this year’s polls.
Votes from 746 clustered precincts have so far been audited, Gaido noted.
‘Good pace’
This year’s RMA was conducted at a “good pace,” Gaido also said.
“We can’t really say it’s faster. It went on a good pace naman given the all the positions that we had to audit and the number of ballot boxes na kailangan nating i-audit, especially considering na kasama diyan ang senators and party-lists [that we need to audit, especially considering the need to also include the senatorial and party-list posts],” she said.
“And if you get to learn how the RMA process goes, talagang komplikado yung pagta-tally ng [it’s really complicated to tally votes for] senators and party-list,” she added.
According to Gaido, the RMA acts as a “diagnostic check” of the VCMs.
“The purpose of RMA is really to check the accuracy of the machine. So what we’re looking [for] is the performance of the machine, how it reads… [the performance [of the] equipment,” she said.
“Napakaimportante dahil yung makina po siya po yung nagka-capture kung ano yung will ng voters natin. Kaya nandito po yung RMA, para masabi natin na naka-capture yung dapat,” she further said.
(It is very important because the machine is what captures the will of our voters. That’s why there is an RMA, so we can see if what needs to be captured is captured.)
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