Voting machines on final testing

ALL THE vote counting machines (VCM) will undergo a final test run in the precincts in the week before the May 9 polls, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) said.

Comelec spokesperson James Jimenez said the final testing and sealing (FTS) of the VCMs, which is required by law, will be conducted by the board of election inspectors (BEIs) in the 92,509 clustered precincts.

“The FTS will not be done simultaneously all over the country,” Jimenez said in an interview.

He said each precinct could pick a day within the week to hold the FTS.

Under Comelec Resolution No. 9981, BEIs are given five days—from May 2 to 6—to finish the final dry run, an end-to-end process that will check if the VCMs accept the ballots and if the count of the machines matches that of the manual count that will be conducted after the FTS.

Working

“The purpose of the FTS is to see to it that the machines installed in the precincts are working as they should,” Jimenez said.

The FTS involves the initialization of the machines, voting by 10 people, feeding of the filled ballots and printing of the election returns.

The BEIs will then  lock and seal the VCMs in the polling precincts and these will not be opened until voting starts at 5 a.m. on May 9,  Jimenez said.

The FTS has proven to be a crucial process when, in 2010, the compact flash cards in the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines were found to have been misconfigured, prompting the Comelec and its technology provider Smartmatic-TIM to replace 80,000 memory cards nationwide a week before Election Day. Jocelyn R. Uy