Don’t panic.
Commission on Elections (Comelec) Chairman Sixto Brillantes Jr. on Wednesday downplayed what he earlier said were discrepancies between the results of the initial manual audit of votes in 234 randomly selected precincts and the electronic tallies in the May 13 balloting.
Brillantes said automated elections were “not perfect” and some discrepancies were expected in the random manual audit (RMA) because of the difference in the appreciation of votes by the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines and by humans.
“It could not be a perfect thing between the machine count and the manual count … You cannot program the eyes of a person. Each person has his own discretion (in appreciating votes),” Brillantes said in an interview.
He ribbed the Inquirer for making the story on the discrepancies its banner story on Wednesday.
“We are not panicking. It’s the Inquirer that’s panicking because of (its) headline …. There’s no need (to panic). This is just the initial report,” Brillantes said.
“Maybe I was wrong with the use of the word discrepancy. Ambassador Tita de Villa was right. The correct term there is variances. I just come out strong when speaking,” he said.
Over 50-percent variances
But former Ambassador to the Vatican Henrietta de Villa, the head of the Comelec RMA committee, said Wednesday that out of the 200 precincts that had reported as of Monday, 143, or more than half of the total of 234, had variances or discrepancies.
“We had to recall their ballot boxes and 90 of these are already with the Comelec,” De Villa said.
Under RMA rules, precincts with more than 10 discrepancies in results should ship their PCOS machines and ballot boxes to the Comelec central office in Intramuros, Manila.
But De Villa said the RMA verification teams would still have to weed out “clerical errors, transposition errors—mistakes in transposing numbers into words—and errors in human appreciation (of votes).”
If there are still discrepancies afterward, these would then be brought to the National Statistics Office (NSO) to determine if they were “statistically acceptable” or not, she said.
“They would determine if the discrepancy is statistically acceptable or if it is big enough to affect election results,” said De Villa, who also chairs the Church-backed Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting.
She noted that the results of the RMA of the 2010 presidential election was 99.6 percent—which was below the accuracy rate of 99.995 required by law—but it was still deemed “statistically acceptable” by the NSO.
Discrepancies decisive
But former Comelec Commissioner Gus Lagman said the 2010 RMA results showed that the discrepancies between the PCOS machines and the manual audit were enough to affect some close mayoral races.
“The conclusion (that it was acceptable) does not jibe with the results. The results showed that it was 99.6 percent accurate when the requirement was 99.995 percent. So you would conclude that (the automated machines were) a failure,” Lagman said.
He said that the required accuracy rate of 99.995 percent “allowed one mistake in 20,000 marks in the ballot” while an accuracy rate of 99.6 percent allowed 80 errors per 20,000 marks.”
“Now, in some mayoral fights, that can make a difference,” Lagman said.
He said the mock elections held in Congress in July 2012 showed that the PCOS machines had an accuracy rate that allowed “557 errors in 20,000 marks.” The accuracy rate in the mock polls in Congress was 97.215 percent.
“That can change even the bottom third of the senatorial fights. The vice presidential race in 2010 would have been tied,” Lagman said.
But Brillantes retorted that automated elections were not perfect and that discrepancies should be expected in the machine count and the human counts.
“Can you imagine 97 percent? Isn’t that good (enough)? And yet they were downgrading or downplaying it by saying the law required 99.9999 …. They know that the machine count and the human count will not tally,” said the Comelec chief.