MEMBERS of Kabataan partylist held a picket in Quezon City on Tuesday, denouncing the technical glitches, election-related violence, and political infighting that allegedly hampered the organized facilitation of the 2013 midterm elections.
The group said Monday's election was a failure, citing reports of malfunctioning precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines and bloated partial unofficial counts.
Comelec Chairman Sixto Brillantes had said the election was generally okay.
"PCOS malfunctioning is not the sole issue. Due to the lack of a comprehensive source code review, we cannot ascertain the integrity of the election results," said Kabataan president Terry Ridon, referring to the human readable instructions of the PCOS machines.
He also accused Comelec of being a possible participant in the "massive electoral fraud and disenfranchisement" in this elections after poll technology provider Smartmatic distanced itself from the inaccurate tallies of citizen's arm Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) early Monday night.
PPCRV and other poll watchdogs earlier noted the wide discrepancy between the total number of votes and the total number of voters in the precincts which have transmitted their results to the Comelec main office.
The citizen's arm later found double counting of results due to slight error in the script file that was used in the transparency server.
The problem was addressed immediately and PPCRV results are now similar with those posted on the Comelec transparency server. (Virgil Lopez/Sunnex)