Tally voter receipts to check if machines counted right

GOTCHA

- JARIUS BONDOC

Before becoming election commissioner, computer expert Nelson Celis had a novel proposal for Election 2022: Manually tally the voter receipts against the machine count. That would show if the machine read the ballots right and transmitted the true precinct result.

Manong Nelson wrote about it in his Manila Times weekly column. He told me how it can be done fast, say, by limiting the tally to presidential, VP, senatorial and party-list races.

Manong Nelson knows electronic voting like the back of his hand. As Philippine Computer Society president and bank cybersecurity specialist, he helped draft the 2007 Automated Election System Law.

When Comelec picked Venezuelan Smartmatic over more qualified voting machine makers, he cofounded the critical AES Watch. He exposed flaws in Elections 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019 and 2022, then was appointed to Comelec in August 2022.

The AES Law requires issuance of voter-verified paper audit trail. Smartmatic did so only in 2016 because compelled by the Supreme Court.

This Election 2025, poll watchdog Namfrel will implement Manong Nelson's proposed VVPAT tally, but on a very limited scale. The National Citizens' Movement for Free Elections no longer has the hundreds of thousands of volunteers it mustered in the 1980s.

Comelec and Namfrel chairman Angel Averia Jr. agreed to tally 10 precinct clusters each in Metro Manila, Northern Luzon, Southern Luzon, Visayas, Mindanao and Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. That's only 6.43 percent of the total 93,287 clustered precincts.

It's like a random manual audit, but done on E-Day, not one week later, Manong Nelson texted.