A PPCRV volunteer waves the Philippine flag. (Photo by BULLIT MARQUEZ / AP)
MANILA, Philippines — The Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) has received 12 percent of nationwide physical election returns (ERs) set for validation, an official of the Church-backed poll watchdog said Thursday morning.
PPCRV Executive Director Maribel Buenaobra said that as of 8:00 a.m., the accredited citizen’s arm of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) had processed 12 percent of paper ERs mainly from the National Capital Region, and the southern and northern parts of Luzon.
ERs from the Visayas and Mindanao are expected to arrive in the coming days, she added.
PPCRV volunteers work in shifts to manually encode the ERs, the results of which would later be compared to electronically transmitted ERs, according to Buenaobra.
As of this writing, 97.36 percent or 85,561 out of 87,851 local and overseas clustered precincts have successfully transmitted their ERs to the Comelec’s Transparency Server.
“Ang aming ginagawa, validation ng paper election returns galing nationwide. Mahalaga ‘yan para ma-compare namin ang result ng paper pre-transmitted o bago pa ito na-transmit ng mga makina,” Buenaobra explained in an interview at the PPCRV command center.
“Para makita natin na walang nangyaring discrepancy,” she added.
On Wednesday afternoon, PPCRV received 10 percent of ERs, while the transmission was at 96.8 percent.
READ: PPCRV asks for ‘patience’ as received physical poll returns still around 10% | Counted clustered precincts now at 97% – PPCRV
The PPCRV, which is mandated by Comelec to conduct voter’s education, poll-watching, and a parallel yet unofficial counting of votes, started receiving and validating physical ERs on Tuesday, a day after the May 13 midterm elections.
Buenaobra said they aimed to finish their validation after two weeks.
PPCRV request
PPCRV remains positive that the Comelec en banc would grant their request allowing them to access the audit logs before and after the seven-hour lag in transmission last Monday, as well as to access Comelec’s central server data to compare it with the transparency server’s data.
READ: PPCRV sends request to access Comelec’s central server data
“Hinihintay namin ngayon ang tugon ng Comelec… Naniniwala kami na sila ay magbibigay ng impormasyon,” Buenaobra said.
Comelec spokesperson James Jimenez clarified late Monday that the delay in the release of election information was caused by a glitch in the application that transfers data from the transparency server to media outlets and the PPCRV servers. (Editor: Cenon B. Bibe Jr.)