Voters whose ballots were rejected by the vote counting machines (VCMs) don’t necessarily lose their votes, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) clarified Friday, May 13.
This, as Comelec acting spokesperson Director John Rex Laudiangco addressed reports that there were 100,000 rejected ballots in Negros Occidental and Bacolod.
Laudiangco explained that VCMs are designed to accept or enable the feeding of the ballots in four different ways.
If there is an instance where the ballot is rejected on the first try, it is “logged” or remembered by the machine and the board of election inspectors (BEI) only need to try other ways to feed the ballots.
“Remember that we have four ways to feed the ballots: upfront, dorsal, and then from the opposite directions. Now, all of the systems that we deployed from the machines up to the transmission, they are designed to login each and every action taken,” Laudiangco explained in a mix of English and Filipino.
“What happens if the voter’s ballot got rejected by the machine? That is already one count recorded. You feed again and got rejected, another record. The machine does not determine if that is the same ballot or not. What it counts is the number of attempts so practically, we accounted those inputs about the rejected ballots,” he continued.
Despite the reported rejected ballots, the Comelec has accounted for all of the deployed ballots during the elections, according to Laudiangco.
This means that all ballots were eventually fed into the VCMs or if there were copies that were not entered into the machines, they were duly noted by the BEIs and reported to the Comelec.