PPCRV stops receiving election returns

MANILA, Philippines - The Parish Pastoral for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) stopped receiving electronic transmission of election returns (ERs) yesterday.

It has received 76.33 percent of ERs, way below the 90.35 percent during the 2010 presidential elections.

PPCRV national chair Henrietta de Villa said it was bound to happen since all the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines have already been pulled out.

“There are no more ERs being transmitted,” she said.

“The figure is now on standstill. There are no more ERs coming in through the transparency server.”

De Villa said PPCRV is still doing a manual count of ERs that continue to come in from the provinces, and that they have so far received some 50,000 out of the total 78,166.

“We are rushing the dioceses for the pending ERs that they have yet to turn over to the PPCRV Command Center at the Pope Pius XII Center in Manila,” she said.

De Villa said they will ask the Comelec to provide them with the unaccounted ERs manually uploaded at the municipal level.

She plans to arrange for a meeting with Comelec Chairman Sixto Brillantes Jr. within the week to discuss the matter, she added.  

One reason for the low transmission was election results in cluster precincts were sent to the municipal, provincial, city and national, not to the transmission, servers feeding the partial and unofficial results to the PPCRV, De Villa said.

Binay disappointed at Comelec

Vice President Jejomar Binay is disappointed over reports that the Comelec failed to address the needs of senior citizens and persons with disabilities during the last election.

Binay said he personally saw how some senior citizens had to walk up three to four flights of stairs to reach their precincts.

“The Comelec should have been more proactive in ensuring that they are not disenfranchised simply because our polling centers cannot accommodate their needs,” he said.

Binay cited media reports of senior citizens suffering accidents on election day.

“This is clearly something that requires an explanation from the Comelec, considering that the poll body itself had issued resolutions that require polling centers to be friendlier to senior citizens and PWDs (persons with disabilities),” he said.

Binay said the Comelec should now use the time leading to the next elections in 2016 to make the voting process for the disabled and the elderly easier and more efficient.

The growing number of PWDs interested in exercising their right to vote should not be neglected, he added.

From 300,000 registered voters in 2010, the PWD sector grew to 362,113 this year.

Binay praised Filipinos who volunteered to help the elderly and PWDs vote on May 13.

“Their willingness to help the elderly and PWDs shows that the spirit of bayanihan is still very much alive in our country,” he said.

Only two out of the 36,778 polling centers in the country were designated as pilot Accessible Polling Places for PWDs and the elderly, according to National Council on Disability Affairs executive director Carmen Zubiaga.

Problems on election day

Twenty-five percent of the country had experienced problems on election day, the Comelec said yesterday.

Brillantes said that about one-fourth of the country had to contend with various hitches, from corrupted compact flash cards to weak transmission signals.

“So it is not the PCOS that’s defective,” he said. “It is the heavy traffic.”

Brillantes said the telecommunication companies only covered around 62 percent of the country.

“I’m not saying that it’s the telco problem,” he said. 

“They tell us what is their coverage. I can tell them that their coverage cannot be more than 75 percent. I’m sure of that.”

Brillantes said the problem on CF cards was minor compared to the erratic transmission of election results to the transparency server.

The Comelec will be coming up with a report on these issues soon, he added.

Brillantes belied reports of a “60-30-10” pattern of cheating in the elections.

“Definitely there was no fraud, I’m sure of that,” he said. 

“They were claiming there was a pattern, meaning programmed, definitely there was no programmed cheating. I can bet my reputation on that.”  – Evelyn Macairan, Jose Rodel Clapano, Sheila Crisostomo