It’s the start of what’s set to take a few weeks, but the Guam Election Commission started the official recount of over 11,000 ballots as part of the audit of the 2010 general election. Sealed away for over two years, the GEC officially began the handcount of an estimated thousands of ballots as part of the audit of the 2010 general election. “So we will count one precinct at a time so today at 9:30am we started with precinct 10 from Yona,” noted executive director Maria Pangelinan. As part of the election reform mandate to conduct an audit of the 2010 general election, the commission decided to handcount a small sample of ballots from 5 different precincts – Precinct 10 in Yona, 14 from Mongmong-Toto-Maite, 15b and 15c from Barrigada, and 19b from Yigo.
Pangelinan explained the process of the audit, saying, “Initially we counted the unused ballots. Those ballots that were not used and X’ed-out before they went to the election return center. Then we accounted for all the spoiled ballots, the provisional ballots, and absentee ballots were dealt with last week. And so then we needed to count the number of signatures in the signature roster to verify what was put on the election commission form number thirteen.”
The auditing team of GEC staff started the handcount of cast ballots from precinct 10 with the federal race. Of the 762 cast ballots handcounted, Congresswoman Madeleine Bordallo running unopposed received 671 – two more votes than the certified results in 2010. It’s attributed to votes being considered undervotes in 2010 due to light pencil marking not visible through machine tabulation.
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