Foreigners stunned by poll fraud

From Manila Standard Today

“The elections were not peaceful or violence-free. Neither were the elections fair nor honest,” the mission said in its report which it presented on Tuesday to Senator Francis Escudero, co-chairman of the joint congressional oversight committee on election automation.

The group however refrained from making any conclusion on whether the just-concluded polls were successful or not.

“I don’t think that it is for us to give a passing or failing grade. It is for the Filipino people to give that grade,” said the group’s spokesman Carolyn Ann Crabtree of Canada.

The group said however that they were not in a position to assess the dependability and accuracy of the precinct count optical scan machines used in the elections because they did not have the expertise.

“We can’t speak of the technology behind the PCOS machines because we do not have any idea or expertise to examine the PCOS machines and their source coding. So we can’t really speak of the accuracy of the counting of the ballots. We didn’t observe the actual counting of the ballots,” Crabtree told newsmen.

From: http://ping.fm/5VWVT