Comelec: No discrepancies in RMA despite 1.3 M ‘overvoting’ cases

Despite over 1.3 million cases of overvoting reported in the May 12 midterm elections, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) maintains that the ongoing Random Manual Audit (RMA) has so far yielded no discrepancies between electronic results and manual tallies.

- — With EJ Macababbad

Speaking at the Kapihan sa Manila Bay Forum yesterday, Comelec Chairman George Garcia said that 176 ballot boxes out of the 726 randomly selected clustered precincts have undergone manual audit, with zero variances detected between the election returns and the manual count.

“So far, we haven’t seen any discrepancies in all the ballots audited. Hopefully, that continues because it’s proof that all our machines functioned correctly,” he said.

Garcia explained that overvoting is not considered fraud or machine error but a common voter mistake, especially in national races like the senatorial and party-list contests.

He added that the 1.3 million overvoting incidents account for only about two percent of the 57 million voters who participated.

In the 2022 elections, around 900,000 instances of overvoting were recorded.

While the figure has increased this year, Garcia emphasized that the RMA confirms the credibility of the automated election system as it verifies the accuracy of machine counts through manual validation of selected precincts.