Encoded election returns now nearly 50 percent — PPCRV

The PPCRV command center (Photo by LYN RILLON / Philippine Daily Inquirer)

MANILA, Philippines — The Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) said that as of 12 a.m. Sunday they had encoded 39,776 out of 87,540 election returns nationwide with still no major difference with figures from the transparency server.

PPCRV Executive Director Maria Isabel Buenaobra said that this equated to 46 percent of all election returns in the country.

Buenaobra said that among those received and encoded were election returns from Albay, Negros Occidental, and Cebu.

Earlier, PPCRV said they already received and encoded partial election returns from Metro Manila, Cavite, Bulacan, Pangasinan, Baguio City, La Union, Nueva Ecija, Cagayan, and Tarlac.

The PPCRV also said that they had received partial election returns from provinces in Mindanao including Basilan, North Cotabato, Misamis Oriental, Misamis Occidental, Sultan Kudarat, Surigao del Norte, Sulu, Lanao del Norte, Lanao del Sur, South Cotabato, Agusan del Norte, and Zamboanga Sibugay.

“We are continuing to receive election returns from provinces,” Buenaobra told reporters at the PPCRV command center in Paco, Manila.

Buenaobra said that their target to finish the encoding of the election results, including archiving, remains to be two weeks to a month.

“Even if we reach 50 percent, we will continue encoding the physical election returns… We will continue to get as many election returns as possible and validate all of the election returns that we receive,” Buenaobra said.

Asked if there had been additional discrepancies observed, Buenaobra said that there were no new reports and that the two minor discrepancies observed last week were still being validated.

On Thursday, the PPCRV said that two manually encoded election returns showed discrepancies when compared with the results in the transparency server.

PPCRV, however, said that these discrepancies would have no major impact on election results.

READ: PPCRV: Minor ER discrepancies have no impact on poll results

The PPCRV is mandated to conduct voter’s education, poll-watching, and an unofficial, parallel counting of votes.

The Church-backed poll watchdog manually encodes physical copies of election returns and compares them to the electronic results from the transparency server. (Editor: Cenon B. Bibe Jr.)