At this early, 200 cases have already been filed with the Comelec!

I learned that at this early there are now approximately 200 cases filed with the Comelec- 100 petitions for failure of election and 100 electoral protests filed by losing local candidates! I am afraid this is just the start of the avalanche of cases that will be filed.

Could Comelec have avoided all this trouble if it had not haughtily dismissed the modified parallel manual count proposed by a group of IT experts? This question is not a monday morning quarterbacking. The suggestion had been made repeatedly and long before the elections. It was for the Comelec to conduct a parallel manual count even for only the top five positions of President, Vice-President, Congressman, Governor and Mayor immediately after the closing of voting on May 10- while the BEIs were still in place in all precincts.

Ironically, Comelec's reason for dismissing the suggestion was that a parallel manual count would delay the proclamations, and such delay would cause a flood of pre- proclamation protests.Now it is reaping the whirlwind of post- proclamation protests.(Or was that the intention?)

It was easy to predict what had happened. A candidate for Mayor, for instance, still schafing from the verdict he could not accept from the grey box, would have grudgingly accepted his loss if he had seen the votes, manually counted in public and watched by his watchers, confirm the machine count.

And why the Random Manual Audit -done weeks after election day and without watchers or representatives of political parties and watchdog organizations- will not stem the flood of electoral protests.
As Mr. Benjie Catajoy, a professional pollster, explained it, survey margins of error are determined by sample size. As the sample size gets larger the margin of error decreases and vice versa, provided that the sampling was random.

"The random manual audit (RMA) of the over 1,200 pcos machines nationwide, will give us a reliable idea on the accuracy of the pcos machines nationwide (this is comparable to a survey of 1,200 individuals nationwide). However, the results of the RMA on the local level will not be able to give a solid indication on the accuracy of the results at the local level, amidst all the allegations of cheating."
In the case of bataan, where only 5 pcos machines will be audited at the district level, this would not be a sound basis for testing the accuracy of the results at the local level because, although you would have a sample size of roughly 2,500 (5 pcos machines at 500 voter turnout per pcos), the pcos areas are not reflective of the voter profile in the district because if this were a survey, you only had 5 small survey areas with a large sample size (500 respondents each), compared to a survey of 2,500 respondents spread proportionately throughout the entire district. But again, we're only talking about the results of the local elections and not the accuracy of the machines.

So there! Sorry, but the RMA comes too little, and too late. And not at all transparent!

Felicito C. Payumo