A delay in proclaiming winners in the Barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan elections (BSKE) in a school where it is one of the few with an automated counting machine, is due to manual uploading from the memory card, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) said Monday.

"You know, even if we automated the election, we do not have an electronic transmission. The results are manually uploaded," Comelec Chairman George Erwin Garcia told reporters Monday night at Pasong Tamo Elementary School.

"That means our teachers still have to deliver the election paraphernalia here, including the ballot boxes, all the materials used, as well as the SD card," he said.

The official counting of votes at the Pasong Tamo Elementary School, one of the areas chosen to pilot the automated barangay and SK polls in the country, began at 4 pm, one hour after polls closed. Canvassing is still ongoing as of posting time.

"The results from the SD card are the ones being uploaded. But if we can transmit electronically, we can upload results directly from the precincts," he added.

Garcia said that using electronic transmission was costly so it is only done during national and local elections.

"So the counting of votes here isn't slow. This is actually fast. If we did the counting manually, the canvassing of votes would take until tomorrow," he said. Jaspearl Tan/DMS