PPCRV to continue verification of poll results

MANILA, Philippines — Even after the 12 winning senators had been proclaimed, the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) said it will continue its counting.

PPCRV national chair Myla Villanueva said they will proceed with the verification of election results through manual encoding of election returns (ERs). 

“We will continue to encode the ERs as long as we are receiving them. Our volunteers are still here making sure every ER is encoded,” she said.

Villanueva said the validation of electronic results of the polls through cross-checking with the actual ERs from the polling precincts is crucial in determining the accuracy and integrity of the elections.

“Remember, what we have here is the fourth copy of the ER. We consider this sacred because this ER is pre-transmitted, meaning this is the actual count of the votes prior to electronic transmission so this can be considered as more accurate,” she explained.

As of 3 p.m. yesterday, the PPCRV has received 55,808 ERs from a total of 85,769 clustered precincts or 65.07 percent.

Villanueva revealed the match or accuracy rate of the ERs and the electronic results they verified so far was at 99.9939 percent.

She explained this high accuracy rate showed “very credible” results of the canvass.

As part of its mandate, the PPCRV collects election returns from clustered precincts in the country and manually encodes them to check if they match with the results from the transparency server.

The PPCRV’s electronic count of the votes, however, has already ended after the transparency server closed following the conclusion of the official canvass by the National Board of Canvassers (NBOC).

The Commission on Elections (Comelec), sitting as the NBOC, proclaimed the 12 winning senators yesterday, formally concluding the midterm elections of May 13.

The poll watchdog’s partial and unofficial tally ended at 98.76 percent of the total votes from 86,461 of the total of 87,540 clustered precincts. It matched with the Top 12 winners in the Comelec’s official canvass.  

The Comelec, however, has yet to conclude its Random Manual Audit (RMA) of the elections.

Comelec commissioner and RMA committee head Luie Tito Guia said the audit team has completed almost a fourth of the total selected clustered precincts around the country.

The RMA teams – 60 of them composed of three teachers each – have tallied ballots from 178 out of the 715 clustered precincts chosen by the Comelec.

The clustered precincts are represented by ballot boxes, containing between 600 and 800 accomplished ballots.

The result of the RMA “will only be significant nationally,” Guia emphasized, as the process is “an audit of how the machines performed in reading the shades.”

The RMA would check if the votes made on the ballots through shading would match with results on the voter’s receipts and the ERs that were both printed by the vote-counting machines (VCMs).

Militant groups and critics, however, emphasized the proclamation of winners was tainted by irregularities during the elections.

“The Philippine electoral system has been reduced to a sham – a puppet show run by the Comelec following a script by Malacañang,” Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU) chairman Elmer Labog said in a statement. – With Mayen Jaymalin, Ghio Ong