Vice presidential candidate Sen. Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. INQUIRER PHOTO/LYN RILLON
THE CAMP of vice presidential candidate Ferdinand Marcos Jr. will demand from the Commission on Elections (Comelec) a systems audit to determine the extent of the effect of the unauthorized tampering of a hash code in the agency’s transparency server.
The head of Marcos’ legal team, Jose Amor Amorado, said they were set to file on Wednesday a “strongly worded demand letter” for the conduct of a systems audit.
“A systems audit will finally put to rest whether or not it’s only the ‘?’ changed to ‘Ñ’ that they tampered with or there was something else,” Amorado said in a press conference at the Marcos campaign headquarters in Mandaluyong City.
He pointed out that the Marcos camp’s IT experts had said it was “the only way to determine” the extent of the tampering.
The legal team will attend on Thursday the inquiry conducted by the joint congressional oversight committee on the automated election system into the unauthorized change in the hash code of the data packet in the Comelec’s transparency server when election results were already being transmitted from the vote-counting machines.
“The legal team will be there, although we’re not formally invited. I think the senator (Marcos) was invited. We will make representations there,” he said.
Apart from questions on the unauthorized tampering of the hash code, the legal team of Marcos has also unearthed “several irregularities” in the tabulation of certificates of canvass (COCs) nationwide, according to Amorado.
He cited a request by the Laguna provincial board of canvassers (PBOC) for the Comelec to reconvene “to correct discrepancies in the manually uploaded election results and the results as appearing in the provincial COCs and the statement of votes of the municipality of Rizal.”
Undervotes
Amorado said the PBOC of Laguna had noticed an irregularity in Precinct 13423 in Rizal where three candidates for Vice President got a total of 12 votes each and the other three getting 9 votes each.
He remarked that it was so consistent that it was irregular.
“We have also noticed an unusually high number of undervotes in this election,” Amorado said.
An undervote occurs when a voter does not select any candidate for a post or abstains from choosing, according to the lawyer.
“We have collated unusually high percentages of undervotes in the vice presidential race in all parts of the country from Regions I, to NCR and all the way to Region XIII and ARMM (Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao),” he said, adding that there are over 3.3 million undervotes in the vice presidential race.
Amorado cited the fact that the 2016 elections had a higher voter turnout of 83 percent than the 2010 and 2013 polls.
Given the hotly contested vice presidential race, “[t]his makes the high percentage of undervotes highly irregular,” he said.
Even then, Amorado expressed optimism that Marcos “will still win the election,” citing the legal team’s tabulation of 100 COCs out of 108, which he claimed showed the senator leading the vice presidential race by 117,939 votes over Camarines Sur Rep. Leni Robredo.