Manual polls not an option despite questions on Miru Systems, lawmakers say

The Commission on Elections (Comelec) should stay committed to conducting automated polls despite questions raised against South Korean firm Miru Systems, which bagged the P18-billion vote counting machines contract for the 2025 elections, lawmakers said Wednesday.

"These are mere allegations [against Miru]. It is for the court to decide. These allegations cannot stop Comelec from delivering what is prescribed under the automated election law. Allegations are not enough reason to revert back to manual elections. Why are we going to go back to the stone age?" House Deputy Majority Leader and Iloilo lawmaker Janette Garin said in a press conference.

Aside from questioning the reliability of Miru's automated election system, former Caloocan representative Edgar Erice has filed an anti-graft and corruption practice complaint against Commission on Elections (Comelec) Chair George Garcia with the Office of the Ombudsman over the poll body's contract with the South Korean company.

"I would really advise the commission to really push for the automated elections. We should not make reverting back to the old practice of manual counting as an option because believe me, that will mean fraud and violence, and you will leave voters distressed because there are people who will force them to do something against their will. It will be chaos," Garin said.

House Assistant Majority Leader Zia Adiong of Lanao del Sur backed Garin, saying that conducting manual elections will surely taint the poll results, if not harm voters and candidates alike.

"In a manual election, there's fraud, violence, sudden power outage. Believe me, we don't want to revert back to that kind of practice. I hope the Comelec will not see that [manual elections] as an option because we already have automated election law, and that would be a violation of that law," Adiong said.

"Reverting back to manual counting would be more costly [for us] than the automation," Adiong said.

Erice earlier said Miru Systems submitted a prototype for Comelec's evaluation which, he said, is a violation of the Automated Election Law.

"This machine is a prototype. It has never been used in any elections. In Congo, they used a direct-recording electronic (DRE) machine. In Iraq and in Korea, they used an Optical Mark Reader (OMR) machine. And this combination of OMR and DRE machines has never been tested in any elections," Erice said during a public hearing in February.

"We will be a guinea pig of this kind of machine. We cannot use prototype machines in automated elections. It will put our elections in grave danger," he added.

Miru vice president Ken Cho previously said the supposed machine failures and delays in the polls in Democratic Republic of Congo and Iraq were frequently raised against Miru, but reiterated that these claims are "not true."

Cho attributed these accusations to the fact that when Miru provided election services for the first time in Iraq and Congo in 2018, it "coincidentally" changed the incumbent officials in both countries.

He reiterated that the governments of Congo and Iraq had issued official statements, indicating that the conduct of polls using Miru's systems was "very successful." — VDV, GMA Integrated News