MANILA, Philippines -- Mock elections were marred by minor confusion and rejected ballots, Boto Patrollers in Manila reported on Saturday.

The Patrollers – citizen journalists who contribute news materials and tips to the Boto Mo iPatrol Mo: Ako ang Simula campaign - said this called attention to the fact that Commission on Elections (Comelec) systems may not yet be as tight as it wanted less than 100 days before elections, and that there are glitches in the way the counting machines accepted the paper ballots.

The machines are supposed to electronically tally and transmit vote results to a central canvassing center. All three schools in Manila where the mock elections were conducted Saturday morning had problems with the precinct optical counting machines (PCOS).

Raymard Gutierrez, a Boto Patroller in New Era Elementary School, in Quezon City reported at 9:03 a.m. that a ballot was rejected by the PCOS. As per Comelec SOP, the ballot was fed into the machine thrice. It was declared rejected after the 3rd try.

Boto Patrollers Reggie Espiritu, Euvelyn Mastulin and Rouch Dinglasan, who all stayed in the Gen. Papa High School in Taguig City, separately reported relatively orderly elections.

Yet, the ease with which people voted was almost eclipsed by the fact that people found the process long (the average, according to the Patrollers, was 15 minutes).

A vote was rejected after 4 attempts to feed it into the machine. Patrollers said this was because the voter had with him, unknowingly, 2 ballots.

This means the election officer who administered the ballot mistakenly gave one voter 2 ballot sheets. That particular voter’s ballot was not cast as it was deemed rejected. The voter also did not have a chance for a 2nd ballot, as election rules dictate.

By 9:37 a.m., Gutierrez said New Era had 5 rejected ballots. “Lumampas ka lang ng konti sa bilog, malukot lang ng konti ang balota, rejected na ang ballot,” the Patroller said in his text message.

This caused a lot of irritation among the voters, Gutierrez said.

But the worst experience of the 3 election pilot areas in Manila was probably in the Maharlika Elementary School in Taguig.

The expected 50 voters failed to show up on time at this school. By 8:22 a.m., Boto Patrollers Patrick Villavicencio, Benjie Rogelio and Jessica Avila were separately reporting voter confusion.

About a dozen people appeared out of the supposed 50 identified voters in that school.

Minutes later, more people started coming. But, Rogelio said, many of these people failed to find their names in the supposed voters' list.

These people who appeared at the polling area were informed the night before by acquaintances from the municipal hall and barangay offices that they would act as voters in the mock polls.

When they showed up at the Maharlika school, their names weren't in the list. Meanwhile, some of the voters in the list have not arrived.

In the end, the election officers in Maharlika made people line up to handpick from them 50 voters. There was no identification sought from these voters, and poll officers simply relied on a “master list” of all 200 voters from that precinct.

Three ballots were rejected in Maharlika because the machine did not accept these. -- by Arlene Burgos, BMPM