Robredo still up with 215K votes in VP race

By: Jocelyn R. Uy, Leila B. Salaverria - 8 years ago

CONFIDENT LOOK Liberal Party vice presidential candidate Leni Robredo is all smiles as she visits the Team Robredo monitoring center in Quezon City on Friday. LYN RILLON

Camarines Sur Rep. Leni Robredo has received more than 14 million votes in the latest partial, unofficial count of the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV), in which she continues to keep her lead with only less than 5 percent of the votes still to be tallied.

As of 8:45 Friday night, with votes from 96.04 percent of precincts counted, Robredo led the race for the vice presidency by more than 215,000 votes in the PPCRV tally.

Robredo had 14,012,780 votes while Sen. Ferdinand Marcos Jr. had 13,797,137 votes.

READ: Inquirer Unofficial Results: 2016 Philippine Elections

“Every single vote at this point is material,” said Ana de Villa Singson, the PPCRV’s media and communications director.

The bulk of the results from the overseas absentee voting has yet to reach the PPCRV’s transparency server. Overseas absentee votes had an overall turnout of more than 432,000.

As of Friday afternoon, the running total of overseas votes tabulated by the Comelec showed Marcos leading by more than 70,000 votes.

Election Commissioner Rowena Guanzon said Marcos received 156,123 votes while Robredo won 84,144 votes. This gave Marcos a lead of 72,929 votes.

More overseas votes

In an interview on Friday, Guanzon said she received a report from Comelec Office for Overseas Voting director Jane Valesa on Thursday night, saying that a remaining 62,000 votes had yet to be counted from the overseas absentee voting.

READ: LIST: Which areas have yet to transmit their PH election results?

“Let’s say if Senator Marcos gets all the 62,000, which is impossible, he will have a total of [218,000]. Then you can compute from there,” she said.

On Tuesday, the Comelec said 429,802 of the 1.3 million Filipino voters overseas participated in the monthlong overseas absentee voting.

As of Friday, the PPCRV had yet to receive results from the Middle East, Africa, North and Latin America and parts of Asia.

With a million votes left to count, Marcos has refused to concede defeat, while accusing President Aquino’s government of manipulating the results for Robredo.

“If you add up all the votes that had not been transmitted, it would show that I won by a large margin,” Marcos said this week.

Late Thursday, he urged the Comelec to investigate the alleged “tampering” of a computer software that received data for the count in Manila.

Technical glitches

The remaining 1 million votes have not been counted yet because of a delay in tallying or because some polling booths did not operate on Monday because of violence or technical glitches. Special elections will be held at those 2,000 precincts today.

A higher number of votes is also expected—estimated at 1 million—from different regions of the Philippines that have yet to transmit results to the transparency server. The estimate is based on the projected voter turnout.

Singson said it was possible that some of the votes from the provinces were already being canvassed without being sent first to the transparency server. This could happen if the machines failed to transmit results and the machine’s secure digital or SD card was just taken to the canvassers.

Meanwhile, Singson said there had been a slight drop in the number of votes of the candidates in the tally on Thursday night from the transparency server after the Commission on Elections (Comelec) placed several election returns under observation.

When she asked the Comelec about this, she was told that a vote-counting machine could have transmitted data twice—the results from the testing of the machine and the actual election returns (ERs).

“There could have been double transmission and the particular ERs were removed from the system to investigate which set of results transmitted was the correct one,” she told reporters.

After the resolution of the issue on which set of data was correct, the correct numbers were again sent to the server.

“The point is, once it’s resolved, they would return that. It’s as if an audit was done, and after the audit, we could see the results again,” she said.

No vote-shaving

The incident is not an indication of “dagdag-bawas” or vote-shaving, she said, adding that the same thing happened in 2013.

She also said the Comelec could give a more comprehensive explanation of what happened.

The concerns raised about the changes in the server accepting election results have underscored the importance of the manual audit, according to the PPCRV.

Singson said that as of Friday morning, the group’s volunteers had encoded more than 14,200 election returns for manual audit.

So far, the group has seen no discrepancies between the numbers on the printed election returns with the results transmitted to the transparency server at the PPCRV premises.

“With all that are coming out now, we have seen the importance of the manual audit,” Singson told reporters.

“If ever there was any change made on the server, you cannot change what is on the paper because that had already been printed and that is with us. That’s why it’s very important to do the manual count. It cannot lie,” she said.

Altered script

Questions earlier arose after it was discovered that a script in the transparency server was altered.

But election officials explained that the change in the script was made to correct the display of the candidates’ names. A question mark was appearing in place of the “ñ” in the name of candidate Roy Señeres, so the script was corrected.

The alteration only produced a “cosmetic” change and did not affect the results of the vote, officials said.

The PPCRV is also seeking more volunteers to help it encode the data on the election returns to check these against the results being transmitted to the server.

“We need more volunteers. We need 130 to 150 at any given time,” Singson said.

She said the group would prefer that the first handlers of the election returns be seminarians, but not all of them could be deployed to the PPCRV because there might not be any left to assist in the churches.

Catholic schools have also been sending students to help in the encoding, she said. The PPCRV would welcome it if more volunteers would arrive, including from parishes, she said. With a report from AFP/TVJ