By JEN BAYLON
Commission on Elections (Comelec) Chairman George Erwin Garcia addressed the request of former Bacolod City mayor and congressional candidate Evelio “Bing” Leonardia to shift to manual counting of votes in the upcoming May 12 midterm elections.
Garcia clarified that, despite the request, the law currently mandates fully automated elections.
“Even if Comelec wanted to shift to manual counting for the upcoming and future elections, as long as the law does not change, our elections will remain fully automated,” Garcia said.
He also noted that although they have been informed about Leonardia’s request, no formal letter has been submitted yet.
Garcia said Republic Act (RA) 9369 amended RA 8436 to mandate fully automated elections, which started in 2010.
He added that while many have proposed a hybrid system — where votes are counted manually, results are written on tally boards and election returns, and then fed into machines — there is no existing law authorizing such a system.
“Remember, Comelec does not have the power to create laws. It is only tasked to implement existing laws,” said Garcia, who was in Negros Occidental’s La Carlota City and Bacolod City yesterday for the signing of a memorandum of agreement between Comelec and Office of Civil Defense to ensure disaster-resilient elections in Negros Occidental and neighboring areas.
“For everyone’s information, our machines are hybridized after voting. The vote is shown on the screen, but taking pictures is prohibited,” he added.
Earlier, Leonardia had requested Comelec for manual counting and manual tallying of votes at the precinct level for local candidates in Bacolod before the electronic transmission of election results is made to the City Board of Canvassers for the polls.
This came after the Bacolod City government recently awarded a P2.1 billion public-private partnership contract to Highdata Infrastructure Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary of SMS Global Technologies, Inc.
SMS Global is Comelec’s service provider for overseas online voting for the May polls.
This has been questioned by several overseas Filipino workers through social media posts for allegedly not correctly reflecting the names of the candidates they voted for.
“This is a clear and significant conflict of interest that compromises the sanctity of the ballot because of the partnership forged by the concerned parties,” Leonardia said in a statement.
The former mayor also challenged Bacolod Mayor Alfredo Abelardo Benitez, who is also vying for the Bacolod congressional seat, to support his appeal to Comelec to implement manual counting in the city.
Through the manual counting of votes, Leonardia said, “Everything will be transparent and no longer be susceptible to doubt and suspicion.”
He is calling on the Bacolodnons to be vigilant of “attempts to manipulate the electronic counting and transmission of votes to ensure the sanctity of the ballots in the midterm elections.”
Meanwhile, Benitez will not file an objection before the Comelec, and he will leave the decision to the poll body whether to go for a manual or automated election, Benitez’s spokesperson, Caesar Distrito, said in a statement.
Distrito said under the law, the counting and canvassing of votes must be done electronically, with manual counting permitted only in specific cases.
The Supreme Court ruled that when the Automated Election System fails to generate a reliable and accurate result, the election officer may resort to manual counting of votes only under exceptional circumstances./JB, WDJ