Screwing up election protests
Election lawyer Romulo Macalintal, in a report, was quoted as saying that election protests that have been lodged, as well as those planned for filing, may all come to naught, since more than 82,0000 precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines that the Commission on Elections (Comelec) leased from its poll partner, Smartmatic-TIM will be pulled out by December this year. According to Macalintal, based on Comelec procedures, contested ballots in any protest case must be fed into the PCOS machines again, to verify the authenticity of the ballot. Trust the Comelec to screw things up — even in post poll operations. What’s the logic behind this procedure of contested ballots needing to be fed to the PCOS machines again, to verify the authenticity of the ballots especially when the machines are themselves placed in serious question, given the fact that the machines failed to read the votes, just claiming that these are “null votes” since the voters could have overvoted, or did not shade the ovals right, or that the voters abstained from voting for any candidate. Then too, from the congressional hearings, it was found that the compact flash cards could be reprogrammed and even votes could be made to vanish for one candidate while adding these up to the other candidate, apart from many other miracles the cheats at Smartmatic and the Comelec cooked up, weeks before the actual voting day. So what’s wrong with going back to the ballot and counting each and everyone of them? One can easily check whether the ballot is genuine or not. Isn’t there supposed to be a UV marking that can at least be checked out by the hand-held UV lamps that were never used, or more probably, never delivered, even if payment was already made and commissions given? Source: The Daily Tribune URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20100617com2.html |
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