April 30, 2010

Chair Jose Melo
Commission on Elections
Manila

Dear Chair Melo,

We are disappointed that the Comelec has turned down our recommendation for a 100% precinct manual audit for three elective positions. We have stated earlier that we are willing to consider even just president and vice-president, or even only one position: president.

For the record, your communications refer to our proposal as “full parallel manual count”, which obviously is not the case. It is instead a 100% precinct manual audit for one to three elective positions, which is definitely not the full count.

We understand that the current audit you are contemplating has a sample of 1.5% of total precincts. We believe this is extremely inadequate, and should come as close to the 100% target as possible.

We also wish to thank Commissioner Larrazabal for his commitment that was made last April 16 at the end of our five-hour dialogue. This was that projectors will be provided in each canvassing center to show the public both the total canvassing center vote counts as well as the individual precinct counts that make up this total count.

We recommend that this be included in the general instructions to help ensure that this commitment becomes a reality.

Thank you for your consideration of this matter.

Sincerely yours,

Ernesto Ordonez
Chair, Alyansa Agrikultura

Gus Lagman
Chair, TransparentElections.org

Note: We do not like the government possibly deceiving the public by continuously saying we wanted a “full parallel manual count,” which makes our proposal sound absurd. We found out that that the promised procedure in the canvassing centers was made through a resolution to have LGU’s help implement this, and that this is not in the GI’s for the canvassing centers. This may result in non-implementation, because the Comelec may not accountable.