MANILA, Philippines - The Commission on Elections (Comelec) and Smartmatic-Total Information Management (TIM) on Thursday admitted that there are discrepancies in the results of some precincts that were printed as election returns (ERs) from those that were brought to canvassing boards.

“We've been made aware of a situation in some places throughout the country where it seems that the transmitted results do not tally with the contents of the memory card. We've studied the problem and we've basically narrowed down the issue to the testing and sealing procedures that were performed immediately prior to the elections,” said Comelec spokesman James Jimenez in a press conference.

Comelec officials said, however, that they have been studying the issue, and that the discrepancies only affected the results for the precincts affecting some 150,000 voters spread out in different areas of the country.

“Now, we've been studying the problem since it was first brought to our attention, and as I said, we've narrowed it down to an issue with some memory being saved on the cards during the testing and sealing,” said Jimenez.

Members of Board of Election Inspectors (BEIs) of the affected precincts were found to have inadvertently brought the backup compact flash (CF) cards to the municipal board of canvassers and not the main CF card which contained the data of the election results in the precincts.

The backup CF cards brought by BEIs of the affected precincts only contained the final testing and sealing results which only used 10 ballots, said Jimenez.

When the results were printed from the data of the backup cards, it indicated that only the 10 ballots/votes were counted and not the actual votes cast during the voting period on May 10, said the Comelec officials.

“If you recall, testing and sealing procedures used only 10 ballots. And so, it appears the most common case is that the results of the FTS, or the Final Testing and Sealing, were saved on to the back-up memory cards, and in some cases where the BEIs had to resort to contingency measures, they took out the wrong card for delivery to where they could print the election returns.

“When that happened, there was now a variance between what they transmitted, which was drawn from the main memory [main CF card], and from what they printed, which was drawn from a back-up memory card. Now the back-up memory card contains the FTS data. So iyong trinansmit galing sa memory card, tama, lumabas. Pero, noong pinrint na nila, ang ginamit nila by mistake, memory card na back-up kung saan naka-save yung FTS. Eh sampu lang iyon. So noong nag-print, sampu. ‘Yong trinansmit tama, may discrepancy," said Jimenez.

The Comelec and Smartmatic-TIM officials quickly said that there was no fraud involved in the discrepancies. They said that this was human error, adding that they could not blame the teachers, who acted BEI members, for the mistake.

Smartmatic-TIM spokesman Cesar Flores, meanwhile, said that this is precisely the beauty in having a main CF card, a backup CF card, and 30 copies of the ERs so that votes can be cross-checked more than once.

Manual COC

To remedy the discrepancies found, Comelec said it has instructed the BEIs to reconcile the print outs of the election results from the data of the votes saved in the main CF card, backup CF card and the certificates of canvass (COC).

The Comelec said, however, that if a discrepancy is noted, the result containing only the 10 votes, as indicated by the backup CF card, will remain in the COC. They said that this is because the canvassing servers are programmed in such a way that it is locked and cannot be added by manual input. Only the precinct results that have been transmitted are accepted by the canvassing servers.

A separate manual COC will, however, be filled up to reflect the true and actual votes in the affected precinct. This manual COC will accompany all electronic results up the various ladders of canvassing, said the Comelec.

When all the election results are in and should already be consolidated by Congress and the National Board of Canvassers, the electronic canvass and the manual COCs will be added.

Comelec spokesman James Jimenez also called on all political parties to remain cool. He said the Comelec is transparent about this situation, and a remedy has been arrived at.