THE congressional oversight committee on the automated election system said on Saturday the panel will summon the Commission on Elections over its plan to have its inspectors feed ballots into the counting machines in the May elections instead of the voters themselves.
Senator Aquilino Pimentel, co-chairman of the Joint Congressional Oversight Committee on the Automated Election System, said he has already raised concerns over the plan even before the Holy Week holiday, but has received no response.
“We will have to ask them [and] will send them additional questions,” Pimentel said, referring to the Comelec plan to order the board of election inspectors (BEIs) to feed the voters’ ballots by batch in case the machine runs out of paper.
Pimentel raised his concerns amid reports that the Comelec may “batch feed” ballots in the event some of the country’s 82,000 polling precincts still do not have the required thermal paper on election day.
A source confirmed that the Comelec has “no other option” but to instruct voters to drop their ballots in a designated ballot box until the arrival of the thermal paper when an election inspector can then feed the ballot into the vote counting machines.
“Even if they bid it, the thermal paper may not reach all respective precincts on time, [the Comelec’s] contingency plan is to drop the ballots into designated boxes and the BEIs will be the ones to feed the ballot into the machine per batch,” the source said.
The source said the absence of thermal paper in the vote counting machine may cause the machine to shut down after the Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail was activated and configured in the machine’s secure digital card.
But the source also feared that unscrupulous people may feed tampered or fake ballots in the machine. “That will not be an honest and clean elections [in that case],” the source added.
The fear is shared by voters themselves as expressed by Erald Finuliar, a voter of Pangasinan, who said “they may give me a fake ballot and feed-in prepared ballots.”
Catherine Sanidad, a registered voter in Manila, said she wants to feed the ballots herself and will not let the BEIs feed the ballots into the machine. “Their plan is a subtle way of disenfranchising the voter’s right to elect the candidate they want,” she said.
Both Flora Mae Padayao of Bacolod and Karen Nicolas also feared the plan may open the door to widespread cheating.
Comelec Chairman Andres Bautista could not be contacted at press time, but he had earlier argued before the Supreme Court that that is one of the risks they may have to deal with the activation of the VVPAT.
During the hearing, Comelec Commissioner Sheriff Abbas, head of packing and shipping committee, said the thermal paper and other election paraphernalia will arrive in the respective polling precincts on May 7, five days after they deliver them on May 5.