Comelec: Soccsksargen polls peaceful, successful

GENERAL SANTOS CITY — The Commission on Elections (Comelec) 12 (Soccsksargen) on Monday declared the conduct of the elections in the region as generally peaceful and successful despite the disruptions caused by malfunctioning vote counting machines (VCM) and secure digital or SD storage cards.

Lawyer Rafael Dinopol, Comelec-12 spokesperson, said Tuesday they have not recorded any major election-related incident so far and the region’s peace and order situation remained stable.

“As expected, it (election) was relatively generally peaceful, which is a good thing, although we had some minor problems with the VCMs and SD cards,” he told reporters.

Dinopol did not cite the number of VCMs that malfunctioned but said most of the problems were resolved by the assigned technical support staff at the polling centers.

He said the machines that totally broke down were replaced by concerned election offices with the standby contingency units.

Dinopol said among the problems encountered by the electoral board with the machines were paper jams and scanner errors.

He, however, noted that the voting continued in the affected polling precincts as the ballots were later fed in batches into the VCMs after the glitches were resolved.

As to the SD cards, he said those found defective were either reconfigured or replaced at their regional technical hub here following clearance from the Comelec’s national support center.

The official said they also recorded problems in some areas during the transmission of results, delaying the canvassing and proclamation of winners in some areas.

He cited the case of clustered precinct 341 in Barangay Upper Labay here that failed to transmit the voting results as of midnight, forcing the city board of canvassers to suspend the canvassing.

“But overall, the transmission of results was generally okay,” Dinopol said.

Comelec-12 has yet to release its data on the actual voting turnout but it had expected a participation rate of about 60 percent to 70 percent.

Dr. Allan Farnazo, Department of Education 12 director, said the conduct of the elections in all polling centers and precincts in the region turned out smooth and orderly.

He said their monitoring center received reports on a number of problems, such as the long queues in the clustered precincts and missing names of voters but those were properly addressed.

“All teachers who were assigned as members of the electoral board reported for duty and no one backed out,” he said.

DepEd-12 deployed some 17,000 teachers in Soccsksargen’s four provinces and four cities for Monday’s mid-term elections.