Pres. Duterte Wants Comelec to Investigate VCMs Glitch
COMELEC – The Commission on Elections reacted to the call of Pres. Rodrigo Roa Duterte to investigate the VCMs glitch during the election.
The local and national elections in the Philippines held last May 9 were automated polls. The Commission on Elections (Comelec) did testing on the vote-counting machines (VCMs) and it was sealed for travel.
Two (2) days before the election day, Comelec announced an “all systems go” and was confident that there will be no failure of elections due to VCMs. The poll body prepared contingencies.
However, during the election day, there were several VCMs that malfunctioned. Many voters had to wait for several hours so they can load their ballots by themselves. Reportedly, there were precincts where the voters were offered to just leave their ballots and the poll officials will just load it once the machine is operational already.
While Pres. Rodrigo Roa Duterte does not believe that there was cheating during the election stressing that he will not allow it, he wants to clear the doubts of some Filipinos. He previously called for the Comelec to investigate the VCMs glitch.
Based on a report on ABS-CBN News, in view of the call of Pres. Duterte to investigate the VCMs glitch, Comelec announced that steering committee head Commissioner Marlon Casquejo will meet with the Comelec Advisory Council (CAC) and the Project Management Office (PMO) to probe the issue.
Reportedly, 915 VCMs had to be replaced during the election day. More than 106,000 VCMs were sealed after the final testing and deployed to different cluster precincts across the nation.
Currently, the Comelec canvassing has already reached 98%. The PPCRV is doing a manual counting of the electoral returns to see if it matches the results of the automated canvassing of the votes.
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