THE Senate Committee on Electoral Reforms and People’s Participation (Cerpp), led by Sen. María Imelda Josefa Marcos, has been consistently deliberating Senate Bill (SB) 7 since it was introduced by Senate President Vicente Sotto 3rd in July last year. The bill is an “Act providing for the conduct of the hybrid national, local and ARMM elections, through manual voting and counting at the precinct level, and automated transmission and canvassing, and for other purposes.” This week, the Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG), through its AES Watch, submitted its recommendations on how to go over the implementation of a hybrid election system (HES) in 2022.
To date, the agreed upon principle of manual voting and counting system at the precinct level should be performed in public; that is, the voter still manually enters his/her votes on ballot paper and that counting be publicly seen by the Board of Election inspectors (BEIs) and watchers represented by different groups in the precinct. The manner of counting is still being deliberated, whether it be computer-aided or pure manual. After the counting, the election return (ER) would be computer-generated before it is electronically transmitted for consolidation and canvassing at the municipal level. This is still similar to our past four elections (from 2010 to 2019) except that the “secret” counting by the vote counting machines is eliminated. It was secret as nobody had seen how the machines really counted — transparency was lost!
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