BY ELLEN TORDESILLAS
A civil society group that had warned of failure of election with the implementation of an untested nationwide automated elections said they they were glad to have been proven wrong.
The Concerned Citizens Movement, the group that went to the Supreme Court to stop full automation of the May 10, 2010 elections , said, “But fair is fair. The elections, despite our worse apprehensions, did not fail. Credit should be given to both the COMELEC and Smartmatic-TIM for this triumph of democracy. “
The group further said, “As we have repeatedly stated, we would be more than happy if history were to prove us wrong. And by God: we’re absolutely thrilled.”
CCM, however, said even if the worse did not happen what they warned about the problem of clustering of precincts and breakdown of some of the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines happened.
“For while we as a nation were elated that results were known even “before we could say Garci “, the reality is that the President Elect himself, Noynoy Aquino, experienced first hand what the Concerned Citizens Movement warned against. First, there were the incredible delays in voting due to our single most major reclustering of precincts. Then there were PCOS machines that did not work and replacements that took hours to arrive. Until now, there are five million votes that still have to be canvassed due to transmission problems. The glitches in fact were so prevalent that by midday,of Election Day, the nation was rightfully alarmed about the possibility of failure of elections,” CCM said.
CCM further said, “In hindsight, failure was averted because of the timely intervention of our public school teachers and the media. In precincts where the PCOS machines did not work and a replacement was not immediately forthcoming, the teachers proceeded with the voting sans the machines anticipating that a replacement would arrive by end of the polling day. Media, on the other hand, played the role of a supportive cheerleader exhorting the electorate to be patient as at stake is the future of democracy in the country. It helped too that Noynoy Aquino’s win was by a landslide since his closest opponent could no longer complaint about possible cheating. Ultimately, it is perhaps the dire prospect of GMA forever, should the elections fail, that prompted the electorate to withstand the torturous conditions of voting that took an average of two and a half hours when in the past, it took only twenty minutes.”