Liberal Party senatorial candidate Ralph Recto today urged the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to consider a two-track method of counting the votes as the counting machines show warning signs of defect during its pilot-testing in several parts of the country this week. Recto said the commission should study the viability of an automated counting for the positions in the national level – president, vice-president, senators and partylist representatives – and manual counting for local positions. The former senator made the call in light of a widespread misreading of ballots by the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines, particularly for votes cast for local positions during Monday’s testing. Both Comelec and Smartmatic-TIM claimed there was an error in the configuration of the compact flash (CF) cards in the PCOS machines and that they are in the process of reprogramming and replacing the said components. “Comelec should have at least a back-up plan to avoid a failure of elections in the event that the PCOS machines develop a severe reading disorder. If there is a glitch in the system that had been overlooked or was unforeseen, the commission should have a Plan B to preserve the integrity of the ballot,” Recto said. He expressed concern that the glitches in the PCOS machines affect only the counting of the votes, and that the testing has not even reached the transmission stage yet. "With only five days to go before the elections, Comelec should immediately come up with a solution. Time is running out and the task at hand seem to be overwhelming,” Recto said. He added that the experience in Batangas, where votes for local candidates were either misread or not read at all like in most of the test areas, can be avoided if a manual count is implemented for local posts. “I am under the impression that the PCOS machines misread only the back side of the ballot, where local candidates are listed. But in the national positions, there seems to be no problem at all,” Recto said. “So what the Comelec can do is implement a sort of hybrid of the automated polls. It can even automate the counting of votes for all positions but conduct a parallel manual count for the local ones.” Recto again reiterated his call for a parallel manual count of the votes as it would solve most, if not all, of the problems now being experienced by Comelec and Smartmatic-TIM. “Everything else would just be a band-aid solution to the problem at hand. But an across-the-board parallel manual count of the votes in all positions would be a catch-all method of responding to the failure of the machines,” he said.