City Councilor Danilo Dayanghirang said that he is willing to submit to whatever decision will be resolved by the investigating body following the declaration of election failure during the Philippine Councilor’ League (PCL) convention last Feb. 27.
Currently the PCL’s national chair, Dayanghirang is running anew for the same post. He is presently engaged in a heated rivalry with town councilor Jesciel Salceda of Polangui, Albay.
The councilor said he does not want to jump into conclusions pending the ongoing investigation done by a three-man team created by the National Board to address the issue.
The second district councilor, during the Kapehan media forum yesterday at SM City Davao, said the PCL National Board should look at all points “to come up with a good win-win solution,” citing that he and his other opponent for the chairmanship are already members of the board.
Through a resolution passed by the NB, a committee was formed to immediately investigate the failure of the automated system.
Dayanghirang said the three-man committee were composed of councilors who are lawyers by profession, which include councilors Darwin Icay (Taguig), Raul Coro (Muntinlupa) and Ramon Garcia (Cebu City).
The National Board initially passed a resolution postponing the elections to a later date and an Ad Hoc Committee is formed to coordinate with Department of Interior and Local Government to set the date of elections within 60 days.
“There are proposal that the election will be in provincial level to have less expenses but then again that will continue divisiveness (among the councilors),” Dayanghirang said.
Glitches
Dayanghirang said the technical glitches was due to the interference made by the camp of Councilor Salceda suggesting additional new features in the system of the computers that was supposed to have been used for voting during the election.
In a statement he released, Dayanghirang said, “Surprisingly, few hours before the voting time, the other camp dictated, inserted new features in the computer which affected the entire computer system.”
“They added something there, of which the provider (computer technician) agreed to. The problem here is (you) cannot change the system overtime. I am not a computer expert but if you made few changes in that (system), there will be problems,” he said.
“Allegedly, when you vote for Tata Sala, the name of the opponent will come out, voting for Salceda, Dayanghirang’s name props up so with other positions in the ballots. But what is highlighted in the social media is my name only excluding other candidates in question were also affected in the trial test.”
Dayanghirang said these mismatch of names was only after the new features have been introduced to the system.
“The voting area was compromised in terms of security. (The) IT guy of the other camp was already at the machine to gain access, dictating the features to the official programmer hired by PCL who even cried due to pressure on site. Their plan to interfere resulted to the distraction of the voting system and even those not councilors hovered the space dominating the mob.
Dayanghirang said they called on the DILG and the Commission on Elections (COMELEC) as they were invited by the national board for the matter.
“That is why I asked (DILG and COMELEC), ‘can you still assure us an independent and an accurate result because you are there as the COMELEC, they said ‘it is not anymore,’” he said.
“Because of that, the NB adopted to the declaration, so therefore we cannot use anymore the computer,” he said.
He said the rival camp called for manual elections but that was very difficult during that time as there were no ballot boxes and tally sheets available. PCL has 17,163 members – councilors of towns and cities in the country.
