Software glitches bug Comelec

With barely three months to go before poll day, the Commission on Elections is still faced with software problems in its automated voting system.

Mike Santos of international certifier SLI Global Solutions, in a press briefing, disclosed that 1 to 2 percent of ballots were rejected by vote-counting machines (VCMs) during a ballot verification test earlier this week.

With 50 million ballots scheduled to be printed for the May polls, the rejection rate would translate to between 500,000 to 1 million ballots that may be rejected by the VCMs.

Comelec spokesperson James Jimenez explained that the rejection of ballots was due to “splatters” from the ink jet printers being used.

“When the machine saw a splatter, it interpreted it as a problem, so it rejected the ballot,” he said.

“Obviously, the problem was with sensitivity. The machine was detecting the marks properly, but it was interpreting them too strictly,” Jimenez said.

Jimenez said the same set of printers had been used in the past three elections, although the precinct count optical scanners  used in the 2010 and 2013 polls did not have the stray mark detection feature. Tina G. Santos