There Were Over 1 Million Ballots That Had Overvotes Recorded After The May 13 Elections
OVER 1 MILLION – Ballots with overvotes – set votes that exceeded the allowed select limits – are not counted by the Vote Counting Machines.
After the May 13 Elections were conducted, ballot counting immediately began as the ballots for counting were initially submitted. For Election 2019 updates, follow this link and keep track of the results.
What a waste! Out of the 45,659,724 registered voters who queued up, patiently waited and suffered the heat just to cast their votes, 1,170,331 of the casted ballots were not counted by the Vote Counting Machines because of overvotes.
The Vote Counting Machines of VCMs deployed in the designated precincts were programmed to only accept ballots with not more than 12 votes for senatorial picks.
Sixto Brillantes Jr., the former chairman of the Commission on Elections said that the total number of overvotes is quite “alarming” and it also shows that there are errors in the educational campaigns for voters’ awareness.
In a telephone conversation with ABS CBN, Brillantes explained:
“There was just not too much publicity on the repercussion of an overvote or the simple statement na ‘pag nag overvote na mawawala yung boto’ [that if they overvote, their votes will be voided]”
Brillantes also looked at the possibility that the voters might have been confused about how many senators they should for because the administration and opposition parties did not have exactly 12 members in their lineups.
This is based on an article from ABS CBN News.
PDP-Laban of the administration only introduced 5 members, while the regional partylist Hugpong ng Pagbabago introduced 13 members for 12 seats.
On the other hand, the opposition party Otso Diretso only had eight candidates.
Brillantes also mention the political parties and sectors failure to raise the notice against overvoting to the voters.
That is all there is to it, at least for now. We’ll post updates as soon as we got them.