A Single Ballot That Was Fed Wrongly To The Machine Caused Some Trouble In Davao Del Norte
WRONGLY FED BALLOT – A single ballot that had no votes was inserted into the Vote Counting Machine caused election trouble and a long queue at Davao del Norte.
Technical problems are very difficult to avoid, especially in a nationwide process. A few hours ago, there were reports of several Vote Counting Machine or VCMs that are not properly functioning.
Meanwhile, the Board of Election Inspectors tried to fix the problem immediately after the problem occurred.
Voters from Sto. Tomas starter arriving at Sto, Tomas, Clustered Precinct 19 as early as 6 am with hopes of being able to finish the voting process quickly.
Based on Comelec’s records, there are a total of 64,276 voters registered in Sto. Tomas.
They were disappointed however, when a member of the Board of Election Inspectors, a teacher, fed an empty ballot to the machine that temporarily broke it.
This is according to an article from Inquirer.
The Election Supervising Officer in the precinct, Ginalyn Caga, said that the teacher reportedly thought that inserting an empty ballot into the machine was part of the pre-testing process.
Caga explained the situation to Inquirer in her statement:
“The BEI erroneously fed the ballot that’s why voters form a long queue in this precinct. But we already communicated the problem to our higher-ups.”
She also revealed that the voters were able to cast their ballots after past 7am after the counting machine was reset.
That’s all there is to it, at least for now. We’ll post updates as soon as we got them.
