MANILA, Philippines - The National Citizens' Movement for Free Elections' (NAMFREL) will still have a role in the May 10 national elections despite being rejected by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) as a citizens' arm for alleged political bias.

Henrietta de Villa, chair of the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV), said she is willing to share with NAMFREL her group's copies of election returns (ERs).

"I have told them that we can come up with a working arrangement because we all want to have credible elections. Even with me, I was telling them I can share some of the things that we have," De Villa said in a radio dzMM interview, adding that they can share with NAMFREL the ERs from the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines.

She said the PPCRV will get 2 of the 30 copies of ERs that will printed by the PCOS machines.

She said the first copy will be part of the 8 ERs that the Board of Election Inspectors (BEIs) are required to print from the PCOS machines before the actual transmission of votes. The PPCRV's 2nd copy is one of the 22 more ERs that will be printed by the PCOS machines after the transmission of votes.

De Villa said that the NAMFREL can still do an unofficial, parallel "quick count" with the PPCRV's ER copies just like what they been doing in past elections.

She, however, reiterated the Comelec's earlier statements that a NAMFREL quick count would be "moot and academic" since the poll body will immediately upload to its website the number of votes that will be transmitted by the PCOS machines from at least 73,000 polling centers.

The Comelec, for the first time, junked NAMFREL's application to be an official citizens' arm in the May 10 national elections. The poll body earlier accredited PPCRV as the citizens' arm.

The Comelec said it junked the NAMFREL's petition, co-signed by the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines-National Secretariat for Social Action, Justice and Peace (CBCP-NASSA), because of its officials' partisanship.

Jose Cuisia Jr., chairman of the board of NAMFREL, claimed that they had a prior agreement with PPCRV allowing NAMFREL to be included in a technical group tasked to conduct the random manual voting.

De Villar, however, denied that PPCRV made such a commitment, saying this function was not "mine to give.”

She said only the Comelec can assign groups to become members of the technical group. Aside from the PPCRV, the technical group’s members are the Commission on Audit (COA) and the Comelec’s internal audit department.

Random, manual counting

According to Republic Act 9369 or the automation law, De Villa said a random manual count should be done after all the certificates of votes have been gathered.

According to the law, she said votes cast in one precinct from at least 230 legislative districts should be manually counted to assess the credibility of the PCOS machines’ automated tally.

She said the technical working group has met 8 times since December, and they initially agreed to add 4 more precincts from each legislative district.

She said 5 precincts from each legislative district “would be a respectable random sampling” as agreed by members of the group and several resource persons, including survey experts.

De Villa said the random manual counting will be conducted by BEIs. She clarified that the BEIs who will man the randomly-selected precincts will not be same group that will conduct the manual audit.

She said 2 suggestions are being considered by the technical working group: conduct the manual audit in the precincts, or bring copies of the certificates of votes to the municipal board of canvassers.

She said that if it's done at the precinct level, the manual audit will start a day after the election or May 11. The start of the manual audit may be delayed to May 12 if it will be done at the municipal level.

De Villa said the technical working group has yet to determine which suggestion is better.