Technical glitches heighten jitters over May 10 automated vote-count in Philippines

Philippines recalls faulty voting machine cards

MANILA, Philippines — The Philippine election commission ordered the recall Tuesday of 76,000 memory cards to be used in the country’s first automated elections next week after some were found to be defective, heightening jitters over a possible failure of the new system.

The glitches just six days before 50 million Filipino voters elect a new president, vice president and officials to fill 17,000 national and local posts, prompted calls for a postponement of the election and renewed appeals for a parallel manual count of votes.

Philippine elections are notorious for violence and fraud, and many candidates and political parties have expressed fears of high-tech cheating.

The Commission on Elections found the defects during its final testing Monday of the automated system, spokesman James Jimenez said. It led the commission to stop the testing and sealing of the machines for security, and to order the recall of all compact flash cards for reconfiguration, Jimenez said.

Cesar Flores, head of Smartmatic, a consortium that won the bid to supply the optical scanning machines, told a news conference that new memory cards with correct configurations will be sent by Wednesday night.

The memory cards, which contain instructions for the machines, did not properly read blank spaces in the ballots for local candidates because of an error in its configuration, he said.

Election Commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal said all the machines will be tested and retested before Monday’s elections.

Henrietta de Villa, of the church-backed election watchdog Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting, said the recalls had hurt confidence in the automated voting system, but noted that the defects had been detected and authorities were providing assurances that the problems would be solved.

A business group, the Makati Business Club, renewed calls for the election commission to implement a parallel manual count of votes for at least five top posts, including president, vice president, House members, governors and mayors.

The election commission last week rejected the proposal.

Eds: CORRECTS spelling of election official’s name in graf 7.