Unofficial vote count slows down

MANILA, Philippines—The “quick count” by the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting of the results of the country’s second national automated elections continued to move at snail’s pace for the second day on Wednesday.

The PPCRV’s latest partial and unofficial tally as of noon Wednesday hardly changed from that of Tuesday evening.

As of 1:20 p.m. Wednesday, the PPCRV had counted electronically transmitted election returns (ERs) from 54,088 clustered precincts. This represented only 69.19 per cent of the total 78,166 clustered precincts in the country.

Only 150 ERs were added to the tally of the PPCRV since 7:05 p.m. Tuesday.

The PPCRV began to receive transmissions from the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines within 10 minutes after polling precincts closed at 7 p.m. Monday.

By 12:17 a.m. Tuesday, the PPCRV had tallied results from 40,815 precincts or 52.2 per cent of the total precincts.

The PPCRV’s unofficial count started to slow down on Tuesday.

PPCRV chairman, former ambassador to the Vatican Henrietta De Villa could not account for the slowdown in transmission, saying the Commission on Elections and PPCRV receive data from the same transparency server.

“Transmission is slow but Comelec told us that they were experiencing the same issue. We will go on working and hoping that it becomes faster,” she said.

As an official watchdog, the PPCRV is conducting a parallel partial and unofficial tally based on the returns transmitted to the Comelec transparency server.