The Commission on Elections (Comelec) released on Friday, Dec. 10, a resolution containing the general instructions on the conduct of the random manual audit (RMA) for the May 2022 automated elections.
Under Section 1 of Resolution 10738 approved by the Comelec en banc on Thursday, Dec. 9, it is stated that as mandated by law, there shall be a manual audit of the precinct vote count results generated by the Vote Counting Machines (VCMs) used for the election in the randomly selected precincts from each of the legislative districts in the country.
"The required number of random sampling of precincts to be audited implies that the coverage of the RMA is national. RMA results, whether of national or local positions, are aggregated on a national level. Audit conclusions are therefore made on a national level. Conversely, no audit conclusion can be made in relation to individualized local contests," it further stated.
Manual audit is defined by Comelec as the visual reading and counting of votes on a paper ballot or its equivalent, without the use of a machine, and a comparison of said results to results generated by the machine count.
At least one clustered precinct, according to the resolution, in every legislative district will be randomly selected for the RMA.
"The actual number of precincts to be selected in a legislative district shall be determined by proportional allocation, that is, based on the number of clustered precicnts a legislative district has in proportion to that of all the other legislative districts in the country," it stated.
For the May 2022 elections, the resolution mentioned that the maximum total number of clustered precincts to be selected shall not be more than 759.
Comelec said in the resolution that the RMA shall be safe, efficient, transparent, participative, and credible.
There will be a RMA Committee (RMAC) which shall be tasked to oversee the RMA and ensure that it proceeds in a safe, efficient, transparent, participative and credible manner.
It will be composed of representatives of the Consolidation Canvassing System Operator (CCSO), Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) and Comelec. The CCSO representative shall serve as the chairperson of the RMAC as determined by its members.
The RMA will start not later than five days after the election day and shall be held at a venue within the National Capital Region (NCR) to be determined by the RMAC.
It is also stated in the resolution that the results of the RMA "in no way" will delay the proclamation of the winning candidates based on the results reached by the automated election system (AES).