FAILED. In Simsimin Elementary School, Kahayag village, New Bataan, Compostela Valley, voters complained against the PCOS machine which continuously rejected their ballots during the 2013 elections.(davaotoday.com photo by Ace R. Morandante)
TAGUM CITY — A legal expert criticized Atty. Romeo “Mac” Macalintal for his wrong analysis on the “Roque” doctrine, a Supreme Court decision which mandates the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to issue a voter’s receipt.
Romel Regalado Bagares, Executive Director at the Center for International Law, branded Macalintal’s analysis as “gross misrepresented.”
“In fact, if you read closely the High Court’s two rulings in the case, the conclusion you get is that the PCOS should be able to issue a receipt on demand from voters,” Bagares said in a statement on Tuesday, March 1.
Macalintal, a former election lawyer during the term of then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, earlier claimed that the law does not mandate the poll body to issue receipts to voters.
Aside from Bagares, former Senator Richard Gordon held the same view, stressing that the PCOS machines that will be used this May 2016 elections must have a capability to print or issue reports, as ruled by the Supreme Court (SC) in February 2010.
Gordon co-authored Republic Act No. 9369 or the Automated Election System Law, which legitimizes the issuance of voter’s receipts. The receipts are meant to serve as paper trail to record voting activities during elections.
“Depriving voters of a chance to verify through a receipt if their votes were accurately reflected [is like] asking them to put their full and exclusive trust in a machine which can be monkeyed around with,” Gordon said as quoted as saying.
In 2010, the SC said in a ruling that voters should be able to verify whether the counting machines have recorded their votes properly through paper receipts.
“All actions done on the machine can be printed out by the Board of Election Inspectors Chairperson as an audit log,” the court added.
With this, Bagares said that the High Court’s ruling confirms that “voters can immediately ask the Board of Election Inspectors to print out the results of their ballots already cast to check if the PCOS machines correctly read their ballots.”
“Until now, the Comelec has been denying voters their right to ascertain whether their ballots are being properly counted by these benighted machines,” he added. (davaotoday.com)
