Libertas, in partnership with the International Foundation on Electoral Systems (IFES) and the American Bar Association-Role of Law Initiative (ABA-ROLI) conducted its first post-election focused group discussion on dispute resolution under the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) automated election system (AES) on 9 July 2010 at the Ilustrado Restaurant, Intramuros, Manila.
The FGD aimed to elicit information on the challenges encountered by election administrators, electoral tribunals, and election law practitioners in the conduct of the first nationwide automated election system in the Philippines.
The group noted a spike in the number of election protests filed in the Commission on Elections (COMELEC) and the House of Representatives Electoral Tribunal (HRET), contrary to the expected sharp decrease in election protests due to the automation of the polls. The election protests filed in both the COMELEC and the HRET are highest in the post-Marcos era. No data on election protests filed in the trial courts was available during the FGD.
Some of the grounds raised in the election protests filed in COMELEC and the HRET are as follows:
• error in the initialization or installation of PCOS machine
• error in transmission of the election result
• error in counting of votes in canvassing
• electoral fraud, irregularities, vote buying
• allowing favored watchers inside the precinct
• allowing favored candidates to give meals during counting and canvassing
• some voters were not allowed to vote
• voters connected with favored candidates were given priority numbers so they can vote earlier than others
• discrepancies in election result
• preloaded compact flash (CF) cards
• misreading of PCOS machine
• vote buying
• fraud and terrorism
• failure to implement security measures prescribed by Comelec
• statistical improbability
• date and time are incorrect
• some audit logs are in Spanish
• some data come in, as big as 18,000 bytes when it should only be 700 bytes
• transmission of training cards
Those who joined the FGD include retire Court of Appeals Justice and for COMELEC Commissioner Teresita Dy Liacco-Flores, COMELEC Law Director Ferdinand T. Rafanan, HRET Secretary Atty. Daisy Panga-Vega, and SET Secretary Atty. Irene Guevarra.
