Filipinos love acronyms! Here are five acronyms you need to know before the elections next month.
PCVL. This is the Posted Computerized Voters List, and it refers to the list of voters that is, well, posted on the door of the polling place. This is the list you refer to when you come to vote on election day. If you’re on the list, then you get to vote; otherwise, you get to cool your jets and make a mental note to yourself to remember to register as a voter, the next time around.
BEI. That stands for the three-member Board of Election Inspectors, composed of a chairman, a poll clerk and the imaginatively named third member. Together, these three EIs run the polling places where voting takes place on election day. For the most part, they are public-school teachers. None of them are employees of the Commission on Elections (Comelec). That’s right. When it comes right down to it, it isn’t the Comelec that actually runs those precincts, it’s the teachers.
VCM. There’s no way you don’t know this one: it stands for Vote Counting Machine—the successor to the PCOS, or Precinct Count Optical Scan, machine. Like the PCOS machine, there will be one VCM for every polling place, serving up to 800 voters each. Also like the PCOS machine, the VCM counts the votes on the electorate’s ballots by scanning each ballot, front and back simultaneously, and noting down the votes received by each candidate until such time as it receives the command to sum up all the votes.
Unlike the PCOS, however, the VCM will be issuing a voting “receipt” to each voter. The receipt will reflect the voter’s choices as indicated in his or her ballot.
After all the votes have been counted, the VCM prints out an Election Return. This is a longer kind of “receipt” that reflects all the votes received, by all the candidates. In other words, it will show how many votes were received by each candidate running for office, one month from tomorrow.
The electronic data, which the ER was printed from, is stored in the VCM’s memory cards. A copy of that data is electronically transmitted to the Comelec’s central computers so that it can be posted on the Internet, for everyone to see. Equally important, that data is also sent forward from the VCM to a canvassing station.
CCS. At the canvassing station, the Canvassing and Consolidation System totals up all the results generated by the VCMs in the precincts within a city or municipality. Each city or municipal canvassing station sends its electronic canvass report to a provincial canvassing station; and all provincial canvassing stations, in turn, send their canvass reports all the way up to the National Board of Canvassers (NBOC).
The NBOC—which is actually nothing other than the commission en banc—gathers up all the election results reported by all the various canvassing boards and, in due time, proclaims the winners of the senatorial elections.
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James Arthur B. Jimenez is director of the Commission on Elections’s Education and Information Department.