Doubts due to fast poll results transmission? PPCRV chair says it was faster in 2019

MANILA, Philippines — The Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) dispelled doubts with the fast inflow of votes in the quick count of the 2022 national election results by reminding the public that transmission in the 2019 midterm polls was actually faster.

PPCRV chairperson Myla Villanueva said in an interview with ABS-CBN News Channel’s Headstart on Monday that the big story in 2019 was the seven-hour glitch which delayed the partial quick count being done by the citizen’s arm.

But this was actually even faster than the 2022 polls — data of which, she said, were opened to students and universities to ensure transparency and increase credibility who all agreed that there was nothing unusual.

“To put it in perspective, maybe in 2019 the big story was the seven-hour glitch.  But in reality data was coming in, we just weren’t seeing it in our servers while the other servers were seeing it.  To be exact, the rate of the transmissions of 2019 were actually faster than 2022,” Villanueva said.

“So you know the data has been seen by many universities, I invited them, you know, in order to help their students and the public understand because technical aspects are very difficult to explain.  But so, to increase the credibility of the results, we opened the data to as many experts as possible, who concluded the same thing, that there was nothing unusual in the transmission,” she added.

Villanueva also thanked telecommunications companies for helping in the quick transmission, urging people who doubt election results to check the data to see for themselves if there were glaring differences.

Also, the PPCRV head stressed that media companies were with them when the first wave of transmissions came in after elections in most areas closed by night of May 9.

“But of course, our telcos also, shout out to them, they prepared much more and essentially did a great job in assuring the elections go smoothly transmission-wise.  We first automated in 2010, so things have improved since then, and closer — by every elections within five or six hours the bulk of the results come in,” Villanueva said.

“I don’t know if it’s slow, if people are concerned if it’s fast […] so we just basically have to share the facts and I hope more people look at the data, it’s open to everyone anyway, the media was with us all night long, embedded in the UST, looking at the same data,” she explained.

Villanueva did not mention which camp had expressed doubts regarding the election results, but supporters of presidential candidate and Vice President Leni Robredo raised several points to question the credibility of election results.

Over social media, there have been several speculations about the elections being rigged — including a supposed 68:32 ratio magic where votes between former senator Bongbong Marcos and Robredo were supposedly split in that percentage.

This has been debunked by PPCRV and the University of the Philippines’ School of Statistics, with the latter stressing that electoral fraud cannot be proven by such claims.

READ: PPCRV finds no anomalies in presidential race count

Villanueva’s statement comes as PPCRV said that it found only a 1.6 percent mismatch in printed election returns and data transmitted to the Commission on Elections (Comelec) transparency server — which she attributed to possibly tired volunteers making typographical errors.

“It doesn’t mean that it is the whole ballot that’s not matching, sometimes you know a volunteer is tired and may have had a typo because we match this two times over.  So we look at the mismatches and in the next few days it can be explained why there was a mismatch.  So, so far so good,” she noted.

Partial and unofficial results from the Comelec transparency server as of last Wednesday showed Marcos leading big, with 31.09 million votes, or over double of Robredo’s 14.81 million votes.

Results for the presidential and vice presidential contest are not yet being canvassed as it is Congress which is tasked to do it, but winners of the senatorial and party-list race may be proclaimed within the week as Comelec, sitting as the National Board of Canvassers (NBOC), has canvassed 159 certificates of canvass (COCs) as of Sunday.

This means only 14 COCs are left to be counted.

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