The Commission on Elections (COMELEC) made a clarification on the confusion being experienced by some Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) who cast their votes via online voting.
It can be recalled that some OFWs claimed that different candidates appeared in the results of their vote lookup.
Others even recorded their actual voting despite the possible election violations they might face to prove that different names were appearing in the vote lookup results.
However, COMELEC said that the code appearing on the “Ballot Content” is not the result of the online voting result, but a coded version of the whole ballot, which shows all the candidates’ names.
“It’s the plaintext version of the ballot itself. So ‘yung makikita nila doon if they actually scroll from the start to finish, what they will see is all the list of candidates that are in the ballot itself,” said Ian Geonanga, Overseas Voting Director of COMELEC.
According to Geonanga, the system does not allow OFWs to see the candidates they voted for until after the official vote-casting to avoid possible vote-buying incidents.
He assured that the ballot results would be released to the public after all the votes had been cast.
The commission also said that the Ballot ID shown in the Vote Lookup proves that the system has already recognized their votes.