Comelec resets canvass Tuesday

Comelec Chairman Sixto Brillantes. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines – The Commission on Elections (Comelec) en banc, sitting as the National Board of Canvassers (NBOC), has decided to suspend all proceedings until 10 a.m. Tuesday.

“Tomorrow when we reconvene after the suspension at 10 in the morning, we shall then be announcing transmission results which we have received,” Comelec chairman Sixto Brillantes Jr. told reporters in a briefing.

He however clarified that the transmission of election results from the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines from all over the country will continue throughout the night.

When asked about when he expects the first transmissions to arrive, Brillantes said: “We are monitoring it now.”

“We expect that by the time we convene tomorrow at 10 in the morning, there will be a significant amount of results,” he said.

The NBOC officially convened around 6:15 p.m. Monday and initialized the Consolidation Canvassing System for several minutes.

He suspended session around 7 p.m. and said that they were not yet expecting transmissions within the next few hours.

“The final agreement was that we will commence and we will resume only tomorrow morning to give everybody a chance to rest because today is Election Day,” Brillantes said.

“Each and everyone of us have been working so hard that we feel we are entitled to a little rest tonight. Just rest a little and we will be ready to proceed tomorrow,” he said.

A total of 36,772 voting centers will transmit the election results to the Comelec command center at the PICC.

There are 77,829 clustered precincts nationwide where 52 million registered voters had cast their ballots for the second ever automated elections.

Longer official results

Brillantes explained that the official results will have to go through a ladderized system unlike the unofficial, parallel results from the citizen’s arm like the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPRCV) and the National Movement from Free Elections (Namfrel) which come direct from the PCOS.

“For us, since this is the official canvass, we will have to wait. [The results] will have to go first to the municipal board of canvassers, to the provincial board, before it goes to the national board,” Brillantes said.

He said that PPCRV and Namfrel can go on continuously throughout the night with their unofficial results.

“The arrangement is they are supposed to come out with unofficial results. In fact they’re supposed to publish it in the websites,” he said.