FILE PHOTO: Commission on Elections (Comelec) acting spokesperson, Atty. John Rex Laudiangco.
MANILA, Philippines — The 1.2 percent mismatch rate that a poll watchdog has recorded in its parallel vote counting was due to “misencoding.”
This was according to Commission on Elections (Comelec) acting spokesperson John Rex Laudiangco, who disclosed Thursday that the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) has already encoded more than 60,000 of the nearly 80,000 physical copies of election returns (ERs) that it has received to date.
“Right now, PPCRV has received almost 80,000 election returns and out of the 80,000 election returns, ang kanila pong (their) match rate doon sa encoded na, na (with the already encoded) over 60,000 ay (is) 98.88 percent,” Laudiangco said in a press briefing.
“Again, the 1.22 percent that is being accounted for, ang (their) projection po nila (is) it’s on account of misencoding,” he stressed.
READ: PPCRV finds 1.6% mismatch in election returns
Some 500,000 individuals have volunteered to work with PPCRV in its validation of votes cast during the May 9 national and local elections.
The volunteers in the PPCRV command center at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila have been responsible for the encoding of numbers in the ERs for verification.
“It’s on account of their volunteers failing to read properly the number because they are already tired,” said Laudiangco. “Iba naman po, dahil tinutupi po ‘yung election returns ‘di ba ‘yung strip, maaaring hindi nila mabasa ‘yung mga exact figures, nagkakamali.”
(Others, since the election returns are folded, may have not read the exact figures, leading to mistakes.)
READ: PPCRV gets nearly 80% of total election returns as of May 19
However, Laudiangco said that while PPCRV will look into the matter, the poll body is confident that it would eventually be resolved.
“Then again, the procedures laid out by the PPCRV works… They would go back to that manual encoding. They would go back to the physical ER. They would re-validate. They would re-process,” said Laudiangco.
“We, at Comelec, are still confident that all of these issues – parang (maybe) out of the 80,000, around 300 ERs ‘yung may kaunting (have a slight) mismatch – this would be ultimately resolved in favor of 100 percent match rate,” he continued.