Commission on Elections denies allegations of cheating in midterm elections

A teacher looks at the receipt printed from a vote-counting machine in a school in Quezon City. Photo: Gigie Cruz/ABS-CBN News
A teacher looks at the receipt printed from a vote-counting machine in a school in Quezon City. Photo: Gigie Cruz/ABS-CBN News

A Commission on Elections (COMELEC) official denied today that cheating occurred during yesterday’s mid-term elections.

The denial came after the hashtag #HalalanDayaan2019 (Election Cheating 2019) trended on Twitter today, with some urging the COMELEC to abandon automated counting and instead do a manual recount of the votes. 

Suspicions arose when the COMELEC’s transparency server last night experienced a glitch for seven to eight hours, wherein it stopped sending updates about the election results to members of the media and cause-oriented groups.

COMELEC Commissioner Rowena Guanzon addressed the cheating rumors in an interview with DZMM this morning and said the transparency server glitch was due to technical problems.

“The eight hours wherein the servers weren’t transmitting the data… there was a delay because there was a clog up. It’s like the system was shocked when there was a rush [of data from the precincts] sent at the same time. You can see there’s no cheating. We have a central server…that was working perfectly all right.”

Because of these rumors, COMELEC Commissioner Marlon Casquejo proposed that the system and audit logs of the transparency server be shared to the public. In a press conference today, he said that he is willing to give them even if no one has requested to prove that the system is clean and free of cheating, reported GMA News. 

This election was mired in various technical issues, such as the case of hundreds of malfunctioning vote-counting machines (VCMs) which the COMELEC had to replace. Some voters including politicians had to wait for hours just to vote in their respective polling precincts.

Meanwhile, there were also allegations that the names which were written on the ballots did not match the names on the receipt that were printed by the VCMs. COMELEC Spokesman James Jimenez has said that the alleged cases of mismatching ballots and receipts do not necessarily mean that cheating occurred.

“We’d like to think that almost everyone always tells the truth, but there is ample room for wrong impressions, for bad memory, et cetera,” he told ABS-CBN News. “There is really no way to tell right off the bat if the person [complaining] was telling the truth.”

At least one senatorial candidate, Glenn Chong, has publicly alleged that he was cheated in the elections. He alleged he was cheated in Cagayan de Oro, Iloilo, Batangas, Manila, Biliran, and Cagayan province, ABS-CBN reported. In one case, he said that a voter voted for him and candidate Mar Roxas, but only Roxas’ name appeared in the receipt.

With most of his allies poised to win Senate seats, President Rodrigo Duterte told the media yesterday that he wants to hear the COMELEC’s explanation about the cheating allegations first before ordering an investigation, SunStar Manila reported.

“COMELEC is an independent body. And if there’s any malfunction or if there’s an aberration at all in the procedure of the process in the conduct of the election, let COMELEC explain first to the people before we even initiate a sort of investigation. That is the cognizance of the separation of powers of our independent commissions,” he said.



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