PPCRV: We’re not into poll fraud

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The Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) has disputed allegations that it was involved in the “insinuated existence of anomalies” in the results of the 2022 elections.

“In the interest of truth and in defense of the thousands of PPCRV volunteers who gave time and resources to help ensure and verify the credibility of our elections, we feel it is our responsibility to refute the allegations alluded to PPCRV’s role in allegedly conditioning the public’s mind on the results of the election,” the poll watchdog said in a statement on Monday.

This comes after a group led by the former head of the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) filed on Nov. 3 a mandamus petition with the high court to preserve the transmission logs on the May 9 polls.

PPCRV said it had been “dragged into the fray” between the Commission on Elections (Comelec) and former DICT Secretary Eliseo Rio Jr.’s group, which raised concerns on the accuracy of the election results for supposed inconsistencies in the transmissions to the transparency server and central server.

Rio pointed out that the transparency server under the PPCRV saw peak transmission at 8:02 p.m. on May 9 but data from the Comelec reached the highest volume at 9:30 p.m., or more than an hour later.

He also questioned why the transparency server logged more than 20 million votes an hour after the voting closed while Comelec data showed that only 12 million votes were transmitted during that period.

“It seems that the transparency server was conditioning the minds of the public as to what the official results will be,” Rio said.

The poll watchdog clarified that the transparency server was owned and fully controlled by the Comelec, which had “full administrative and managerial control.”

“PPCRV is a recipient, one of several accredited recipients, of raw data transmitted by Comelec through the transparency server,” it said.

Other recipients of the same copies of the election returns transmitted through the transparency server include political parties, accredited media outfits and the National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel). INQ