88 ballot boxes manually audited so far—Comelec


Comelec/MB

The Commission on Elections (Comelec) and its partners have so far finished manually auditing 88 ballot boxes.

Based on its latest random manual audit (RMA) bulletin, the data was as of May 17. The RMA committee is currently processing 16 ballot boxes.

To note, ballot boxes from 757 clustered precincts were selected for the conduct of RMA.

The RMA is the process of “examination to determine whether the automated count of the Vote Counting Machines (VCMs) under an Automated Election System (AES) is accurate based on a manual verification of said count,” the Comelec said.

The Comelec’s partners for the conduct of RMA include election watchdogs the Legal Network for Truthful Elections (LENTE), National Citizens' Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel), Philippine Statistics Authority, Philippine Institute of Certified Accountants (PICPA), among others.

The RMA started last May 12 and is expected to finish after 45 days. It is currently being conducted at the Diamond Hotel in Manila.

"RMA Teams, Verifiers, and Supervisors are deployed by batch. One batch stays seven days in the venue to see through the process of auditing," the Comelec said.