MANILA: Like in the 2010 elections, the winners of this year’s electoral exercise will be known within 48 hours after voting ends, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) declared.
“Within 48 hours, more or less, we’ll know the winners. In the municipal and city level, like what happened in 2010, within 24 hours everything was finished, winners were already known,” Comelec Chairman Sixto Brillantes said.
Brillantes said Comelec had revised its policies on the proclamation of winners on May 13.
“The system before was that all precinct results must come out before you can proclaim. We changed that, it’s one of the enhancements that we’ve done under the PCOS (precinct count optical scan) machines system,” he said.
But for the next month’s elections, winners could be proclaimed “if the un-transmitted results will no longer affect the total results” of the elections.
“Now you can proclaim without waiting for all results to be completed. Before, if the results are pending, you can’t proclaim. That was unreasonable,” Brillantes said.
For decades when the country’s elections were done manually, results of the winners of national elective post would be known only after three weeks to one month.
This provided opportunity for cheating and other forms of manipulation of poll results.
To make the elections more secure and credible, the Department of Education (DepEd) and the Integrated Bar of the Philippines (IBP) signed memorandum of agreements with the Comelec.
Brillantes said there will be more teachers – 240,000 in all – who will serve as members of the Board of Election Inspectors (BEIs) and he assured them that “they will be properly compensated.”
THE PHILIPPINE STAR
