‘Manual counting very time consuming’

The manual counting of votes for congressional delegate candidates at the Multi-Purpose Center in Susupe took the Commonwealth Election Commission seven hours to complete.

“It was very time consuming. It took us seven hours. I was hoping it would take us only six hours at the most,” CEC chairwoman Frances Sablan told Saipan Tribune yesterday.

The election officials began the tabulation of votes at 12:15am. The counting was done by 7:15am.

Sablan said the counting took longer even though they kept their breaks to just five minutes each, about three to four times.

“I’m hoping that we never go through this process again, especially for next year,” she said.

Sablan said the delay could be due to the methodology or the process they used.

“When we met last week we talked about trying to be as expedient as possible. So we tried to come up with a methodology that would make it faster,” she said.

The chairperson said there are seven precincts; in some precincts, there are five different sections.

CEC implemented a four-step process in manually counting the votes.

The first step was sorting. All seven commissioners were on hands to do the sorting of votes.

Sablan said they were, however, short of two commissioners who could have helped make the sorting faster.

In step 2, election officials initially planned to take care of discrepancies like over-votes and the blank votes or those in question.

“But then after the first precinct, we decided to change it because we found out that after we had already counted, the over-votes and the blank votes and the spoiled, sometimes when we’re verifying the batch that we sorted, we found out that we had to add on and then we had to initial again and cross out. We had to change that system,” she said.

Step 3 was the actual verification or checking to make sure that what they had sorted was correct.

The final step was the counting itself.

Sablan said one other reason for the delay was that they didn’t process first those votes coming from different precincts like Rota or Tinian who came to Saipan to votes.

“They came here because of an emergency, so they voted here. There were several of those. We didn’t do that first. So what we did is, we counted precinct 7, for instance, and we thought we’re done,” she said.

Sablan said when she was checking again the valid boxes, she saw those votes so they had to sort those out and then add them to the precincts.

“That was another slight delay. But we tried to expedite that as soon as possible,” the chairperson added.

Sablan said the turnout was about 73 percent in terms of voters.

“That’s pretty good. I could just imagine when there’s actually 80 percent that came out. It would take us a little bit longer,” she said.