PPCRV starts manual count of election returns

Anna de Villa Singson, media and communication director of PPCRV, vows to make available the final result of their count as she explains the process of manual encoding. Video by INQUIRER.net’s Noy Morcoso lll

Ana De Villa-Singson, media director PPCRV, shows an actual election return as she gives media a walkthrough of the process of manually encoding election returns. Photo by Celest R. Flores/INQUIRER.net

MANILA, Philippines — The election watchdog Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) started Tuesday its manual count of the pre-transmission election returns.

Along with its electronic count — which is being reported real time– the PPCRV was also mandated by the Commission of Elections (Comelec) to do an additional audit of the elections returns.

Ana De Villa-Singson, the media director of the PPCRV, described their copy of the election returns as the “cleanest, purest form of data.”

Singson said that each precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machine prints eight copies right after it closes and before it transmits the data to the Comelec Transparency Server.

After transmission, the PCOS machine prints another set of election results. But the pre-transmission elections returns are the data the PPCRV have.

From the provinces, they are shipped by their coordinators via Air21 to the PPCRV Command Center on United Nations Avenue in Paco, Manila, where their volunteers will encode it twice.

The seniors in the PPCRV then do “further verification” of the encoded election returns, before they are compared to the unofficial parallel count.

As of 2:41 p.m., 53,607 of 78,166 clustered precincts have been transmitted to the PPCRV.

“If there was no manipulation, they (manual/electronic data) should be the same. They should be ideally, theoretically, statistically be the same,” said Singson.

Singson said that the PPCRV has received election returns from as far as North Luzon and expects those from the Visayas and Mindanao this afternoon.