The National Citizens' Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel) said it is already prepared to assist the Commission on Elections (Comelec) in the conduct of the random manual audit (RMA) to validate the result of this year's automated election.
“The task assigned to us by the Comelec is basically the random manual audit. So, we are prepared for that. We’ve been doing that since 2010, so it is not something that’s new to us,” said Namfrel Chairman Gus Lagman during a television interview on Friday, May 6.
“And also, the good thing about that is we don’t need as many people as we used to deploy because it is only a random manual audit,” he added.
Only 759 out of the 106,000 precincts will be selected for the RMA, said Lagman.
“We will manually tabulate the ballots and compare them to the official automated results of the Comelec,” he said.
Comelec defined RMA 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 generated by the machine vote."
“The RMA proper shall start not later than five days after Election Day and shall be held at a venue within the National Capital Region to be determined” by the RMA Committee. For this year’s election, the RMA will be conducted at the Diamond Hotel in Manila.