Few hitches in provincial mock elections

MANILA, Philippines - Mock elections held in the provinces on Saturday morning were declared a success despite a few incidents of ballots rejected by the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines.

All PCOS machines in 3 polling precincts in the cities of Davao, Baguio and Cebu rejected a few ballots fed by registered voters who participated in the mock polls.

In Davao City, a ballot jammed the PCOS machine at the Generoso Elementary School around 8:24 a.m.. It took a Smarmatic-TIM technician 5 minutes to take out the jammed ballot and restart the machine.

Another ballot was also rejected by the same voting machine and declared void because the voter placed a check mark instead of shading his ballot.

PCOS machines at the Pines City National High School in Baguio City and the Bulacao Community School in Cebu City rejected one ballot each.

Election officers in Baguio City said the rejected ballot was not properly shaded by the voter while the rejected ballot in Cebu City had a smeared bar code.

Teachers, acting as board of election inspectors (BEIs), at the Pines City National High School said the rejected ballot would still be included in the mock elections results. They said the ballot will be brought to the municipal level and then manually counted.

In another polling center at the Mabini Elementary School, also in Cebu City, the BEIs failed to transmit the votes through mobile network signals. They were forced to use the BGAN (broadband global area network) satellite antenna and succuessfully fed the results to the servers in 16 minutes.

Despite the hitches, all PCOS machines in the 3 cities were able to transmit votes to the municipal level servers and successfully received by the central server at the Commission on Elections main office in Intramuros, Manila.

The mock elections started at 8 a.m. and ended at 10 a.m. The Comelec said the central server received the results of the mock elections in the 3 cities before noon. -- Reports from Reno Tallado and Carine Asutilla, ABS-CBN Cebu; Francis Magbanua, ABS-CBN Davao and Dhobie de Guzaman, ABS-CBN Baguio

Source: Yahoo News