text: It was a simpler and new way of cheating, used for the first time in the elections of 2004. They alleged that instead of changing the ballots at the precincts -- as was done in the past, which is difficult and labor-intensive -- the cheating was done on the election return (ER), the summary of the votes in the precincts. They alleged that these spurious ERs were prepared in advance, by a special force of about 200 persons in two places in Metro Manila (one in a hotel near the Edsa highway) and then sent to the provinces. The Commission on Elections has admitted that it overprinted 32,000 sets of these ERs before the elections. It has not explained fully what happened to these excess ERs. Of the approximately 5,000 ERs analyzed, 3,000 were found to be spurious. The vertical tally bars ("taras") used to mark the votes on the ERs were written very neatly and not in the uneven manner when written in the precincts because of stress and haste. There are columns where there are totals of votes but no bars. There are totals that do not tally with the bars. Thumb marks used to close the columns -- so no new bars could be added afterwards-were small, purposely smudged to make identification impossible.