THE Commission on Elections halted the printing of the official ballots Wednesday after they learned that they forgot to indicate presidential aspirant Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago’s political party, the People’s Reform Party, beside her name on the ballot.
Both Comelec Chairman Andres Bautista and head of the printing committee Genevieve Velicaria-Guevarra confirmed that printing of the official ballots had stopped on Tuesday, a day after it began.
“No party was written beside the name of Santiago,” Bautista said in Filipino.
In a text message, Guevarra said the National Printing Office was able to print 39 ballots for final testing and sealing for overseas ballots for Japan when they found the error.
She said as soon as they learned of the error, they alerted the Comelec to correct and change the ballot face.
As of 6 p.m. Wednesday, the NPO was still waiting for the corrected ballot faces from the Comelec warehouse in Laguna.
Guevarra said while they are waiting for the corrected ballot face, they were printing 750,000 demo ballots, bearing the names of singers and band groups.
Guevarra said the delay could cut the buffer time for printing.
“This is a cause for concern. We don’t want a repeat of this because we don’t want any more causes of delay,” she said.
She said she was optimistic, however, that they would meet the April 25 deadline set by the Comelec.
Printing of the official ballots began Monday after this had been postponed three times.
Bautista walked journalists through the NPO in Quezon City to show samples of the more than 56 million official ballots that the NPO started printing Monday.
The NPO has 71 days to produce 54.36 million ballots for Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao, 1.18 million overseas absentee voting ballots and 1.2 million ballots for testing.
The Palace on Wednesday urged the Comelec to ensure that the May elections are clean, honest and peaceful.
A poll watchdog on Tuesday warned of the possibility of cheating in the elections despite assurances that the automated election system source code is “secure.”
Source code reviewer Pablo Manalastas said he does not discount the possibility of vote rigging and electoral cheating in this year’s general elections, stressing that the Comelec and the Smartmatic-Total Information Management Corp. may connive to favor political candidates.
“They put enough security to make it hard for outsiders to use the system to cheat. But, if they want to cheat, they can do that,” Manalastas, a retired professor of the Ateneo de Manila University Department of Information Systems and Computer Science, told the Joint Congressional Oversight Committee hearing on the Automated Election System Tuesday.
“The system is secure, but hacking the system can be done through the cooperation of people who are in charge of the data system and who have physical control of machines. It is possible to cheat with a lot of help from Comelec and Smartmatic,” Manalastas said.
Asked how many people could carry out the electoral cheating, he said: “One or two people depending on the set up of the Comelec.”
Marlon Garcia, Technology Manager of Smartmatic, disputed Manalastas’ claims, explaining that “not a single person has access to all the different components of the system.”
He said not even Comelec Chairman Andres Bautista has full access to the system.
Asked by Pampanga Rep. Oscar Rodriguez if there is no way for somebody to influence or manipulate to favor some candidates in the operations of the machines, Garcia replied, “No. There is no way to go inside. There is no way for somebody to manipulate the machines or go into the system and favor a particular candidate.”
During the hearing, Bautista said he has no access to the system. “You have to understand the whole process,” he said.
He said those who have concerns about the source code, including political parties, have been given seven months to conduct the code review.
During the hearing, lawyer Ivan John Uy of the United Nationalist Alliance sought a review of the voting counting machines.
“We urge the Comelec to allow us to review the hardware. These are brand new machines. We want to make a random inspection of the machines,” Uy said.
Comelec Commissioner Christian Robert Lim assured Uy that he will meet with them and other political parties to tackle their concerns.