Poe leads Senate count

Step aside Loren Legarda, the perennial No. 1 in preelection surveys of voters’ preferred senatorial candidates.

Grace Poe of Team PNoy was leading in the partial and unofficial count early Tuesday by the Commission on Elections and its citizens’ arm that saw nine administration candidates and three United Nationalist Alliance candidates in the winning circle.

Poe, daughter of the late actor Fernando Poe and actress Susan Roces, got 14,142,601 votes as of 5:21 a.m. Tuesday, according to the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting’s (PPCRV) partial and unofficial tally.

Poe was followed by Legarda and Francis “Chiz” Escudero in second and third spots, respectively.

It was 9-3 in favor of Team PNoy on the partial and unofficial count by the PPCRV as of 5:21 a.m. Tuesday.

The PPCRV resumed its count after going dark for roughly an hour Monday night, when suspicious results that reflected a double count were displayed on its partial and unofficial parallel count at the Pope Pius XII Center in Manila.

Ana de Villa Singson, PPCRV media and communications director, said a “consistency check” with PPCRV’s Transparency Server past 9 p.m. showed that the formatting of the figures resulted in an inadvertent double count, leading to a vote count too high for the number of precincts they represent.

Marlon Garcia, Smartmatic’s representative at the PPCRV center, readily fixed the system’s script file, which is suspected to have caused the formatting problem.

“We’re going back up,” said Singson.

“This data had gone through a consistency check with all workstations, organizations in the transparency server room,” she said.

The PPCRV went ahead with its count even after the Comelec decided to suspend the national canvass of votes.

Sen. Franklin Drilon, Team PNoy campaign manager, expressed  surprise over the Comelec decision even as initial partial results broadcast by television stations showed that administration senatorial candidates were dominating the race early last night.

“That they will commence the canvassing at 10 a.m. tomorrow is something we did not expect,” Drilon told reporters as the initial results started pouring in through the media after 7 p.m.

“But nevertheless, as the dominant majority party and you in media, we should continue with the canvassing as we receive the results electronically transmitted to our servers,” he added.

The Comelec, sitting as the National Board of Canvassers (NBOC), on Monday night suspended the national canvassing of votes for the senatorial and party-list elections to give every one time to rest.

[Later on Monday night the Comelec changed its mind and proceeded with the official count.]

Comelec Chairman Sixto Brillantes Jr. earlier said the canvassing would resume Tuesday at 10 a.m. at the Philippine International Convention Center in Pasay City so that the NBOC would also already have a “substantial” number of transmitted results to canvass and report out to the public.

“We don’t expect to receive much in the next few hours so we decided to adjourn until 10 a.m.,” Brillantes told reporters after the canvassing was suspended at around 7:20 p.m.

“We are all somewhat tired. This is to give everybody a chance to rest. We should rest for a while. (On Tuesday), when we come out, we come out with all the results and then continuously,” he said.

Brillantes said there would be no “hocus-pocus” as PPCRV would continue receiving and reporting the unofficial results from the field.

Drilon said the Team PNoy headquarters would continue to canvass and although “this is unofficial, the people would want to know the results immediately.”—With a report from Norman Bordadora

Originally posted: 11:45 pm | Monday, May 13th, 2013