Namfrel says Comelec denied them accreditation as citizens arm for May polls

May 3, 2019

The National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel) announced on Friday that it was denied accreditation as the citizen’s arm of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) for the May midterm elections.

In a press conference on Friday, Namfrel announced it has decided to operate their election-related duties without the accreditation from the commission.

The decision was made after Comelec only partially approved their accreditation.

Namfrel Chairperson Gus Lagman said their poll activities will still push through. He said although it would take longer, Namfrel will rely on their volunteers and some sources, which he refused to disclose.

“We can’t understand why we are not being given free access to the election data. Our only intention is to help Comelec make their work more credible to the public. If we have access to the election data then we can do our own analysis which they don’t do normally anyway,” Lagman, a former Comelec commissioner, said.

“We will do what we have to do,” he added.

A manifestation filed by Namfrel on April 30 before the Comelec explained that the group was not allowed to gain access to the election generated data, which they said is crucial in analyzing data and identifying any possible irregularities in the polls.

“The Petitioner (Namfrel) thanks the Commission for granting accreditation to conduct the Random Manual Audit, but notes that the Commission declined to grant Petitioner’s prayers retailed to open access data,” the manifestation read.

Lito Averia, a member of the Namfrel council said: “we filed a manifestation…we thought that the data that we were requesting would be important and significant to support our final report on the results of the random manual audit.”

The group said in the manifestation the data withheld from them would include data from main server, audit logs, DNS serves logs, single line transmission diagram, data structure of transmitted ER and COC, the voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) on random manual audit selected precints, vote counting machine consolidation and canvassing system logs and other related data.

“Without open access to information and data, Petitioner is unable to participate in the RMA (reading manual audit) because the inaccessibility diminishes the verifiability of data separately provided during the RMA,” the group said. Cristina Eloisa Baclig/DMS