INQUIRER file photo
MANILA, Philippines — An American election forensic expert presented by a Filipino-American civic group on Tuesday said he did not find “substantial” fraud in the May 9 elections to alter the outcome of the votes for president and vice president.
“I’ve had cases where there are large protests even though analysis using various tools by me — and eforensics is the latest that I think was most trustworthy I’ve used over the years — (have) not substantiated that there was substantial fraud in the elections, so that’s the message of the numbers I came up with,” said University of Michigan political science and statistics professor Walter Mebane.
Mebane spoke at an online news conference arranged by the Global Coalition of Filipinos for Good Governance on Tuesday.
“I think it’s important not to claim there are frauds when there are no frauds,” he said.
‘Probable’
Mebane applied statistical analysis, or eforensics, on the votes transmitted by 105,649 out of the total 106,174 polling precincts to detect probable fraudulent votes, or votes that were either manufactured or stolen from other candidates.
He said he found that 416,109 votes for President-elect Ferdinand Marcos Jr. from 2,079 precincts were likely produced by fraud, while 1,710,029 more votes from 25,144 precincts were likely produced by a mix of fraud and the vote-shifting behavior of voters.
“The total of these two is only 2.1 million votes, which is not enough to have changed the outcome no matter what you think about the votes,” Mebane said.
“Whether you think that is enough to invalidate the election is a very different consideration, but it’s not enough to have changed the outcome based on the arithmetic,” he added.
‘Misdirected effort’
Based on the official canvass, Marcos received 31,629,783 votes, or 58.77 percent, of votes counted and twice the 15,035,773 votes received by his main rival Vice President Leni Robredo.
Mebane said 467,816 votes for Vice President-elect Sara Duterte from 2,156 precincts were likely produced by fraud while 796,455 more votes from 11,310 precincts were produced by a mix of fraud and voter’s behavior to shift votes between candidates.
The daughter of President Rodrigo Duterte received 32,208,417 votes, or 61.33 percent, of the votes counted, trouncing second-place outgoing Sen. Francis Pangilinan who had 9,329,207 votes.
Mebane, who had also performed eforensics on elections in Afghanistan and Mexico, said he did not believe that there would be a “huge motivation” for an election protest based on the results of his study even though he did find “fraudulent votes.”
He said protesting in the streets against this scale of election fraud would be a “kind of misdirected effort” to reforming the process and “upping the quality” of voter participation, correcting the news conference organizers’ claim of “massive fraud uncovered” in the elections.
In the same news conference, Eric Lachica of the US Filipinos for Good Governance and information and technology engineer Phil Daily agreed there was no reason to overturn the outcome of the polls.
“The reason for our presentation is not to overturn the election ‘cause it’s too late for that. The reason for this presentation is to just mention the election integrity and democracy and … hopefully implement the proposals of Gus Lagman,” said Daily.
For academic purposes
The proposal by Lagman, chair of the poll watchdog National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections and former commissioner of the Commission on Elections (Comelec), was to revert to manual precinct vote count, according to Lachica.
He said the discussions on election fraud was “more of an academic exercise.”
“We are preparing for the midterm elections in 2025 and the 2028 presidential elections. We have to take steps to ensure accurate and fair elections,” Lachica said.
In another news conference also on Tuesday in Quezon City, Lagman said his proposal was to shift to a “hybrid system that entails manual precinct counting for transparency and automated canvassing for speed.”
At the same news forum, former Information and Communications Technology Secretary Eliseo Rio Jr. noted that during the vote count a “distinct pattern” emerged showing a “statistically improbable” ratio of votes among the presidential vice presidential candidates.
Businessman Franklin Ysaac, former president of the Financial Executives Institute of the Philippines, said Comelec should allow an independent body composed of IT professionals to audit all the secure data (SD) cards used in the automated polls immediately after the elections and prior to the transmission of election returns to the Comelec servers.
The SD cards contain the program that runs the more than 106,000 vote-counting machines.
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