The Philippines, Manila – June 20, 2016 – The Carter Center, one of the world’s leading election monitoring organizations, has cited the recent May 9 elections in the Philippines as being markedly better than previous electoral exercises.
In their report titled “Limited Election Observation Mission to the Philippines” released to media yesterday, the Carter Center said that based on its observation of the last polls, “most electoral stakeholders seemed to feel that the automated elections of 2016 marked a significant improvement over previous Philippine elections”.
The statement also noted that Filipino voters seems to have more confidence in the election system this year compared to the past.
“The fast public availability of vote tallies (…) resulted in widespread praise for the work of Comelec [Commission on Elections] and greatly shortened the period of uncertainty that used to exist between the close of voting and the public knowledge of results”, stated the report.
The Carter Center highlighted two important points regarding the transmission process of election results: multiple copies of election returns (poll counts) were distributed to candidate and party representatives; and the fact that there were three servers where results were transmitted to. A simple comparison between the printed copies of election returns against the published results allows political parties to validate the results and be confident in the overall legitimacy of process.
The report also commented on the fast proclamation of winning candidates. Comelec was able to proclaim new Senators in record time: “The declaration of complete Senate and party-list results had never previously taken place on the same day or been completed so soon after polling”.
The Philippine Congress was also able to proclaim the president-elect and vice president-elect of the Republic just 21 days after the May 9 elections. This represented the fastest ever proclamation for the country’s top two posts. This feat was possible thanks to the speediest canvassing proceedings in the country’s history – concluded in just three days.
