PPCRV finds 1.6% mismatch in election returns

MANILA, Philippines — The Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV), the private sector partner of the Commission on Elections (Comelec), on Saturday reported mismatches between the printed election returns (ERs) and those sent to the poll body’s transparency server.

Van dela Cruz, the spokesperson for the PPCRV, said the PPCRV found the mismatches in 240 ERs and the group will have to review them, but the matching rate remained at 98.39 percent match and the 1.61-percent mismatch would likely not affect the results of the contests for national positions.

The poll watchdog has so far received nearly half of ERs from local clustered precincts, or 45,135 copies, but it has yet to get ER copies from abroad.

Of the total, 30,727 had already been encoded for the manual audit. But only 30,235 ERs matched with the transmitted results from the server and 240 ERs were up for revalidation.

Dela Cruz said that 49 ERs would be lined up in the next batch of manual validation, while the remaining 203 ERs had no equivalent digital ERs because the Comelec stopped transmission at 98.35 percent.

“They will be reviewed manually, then revalidated or reprocessed. Why? Sometimes it could be because they (volunteers) can’t read the numbers clearly or sometimes they made mistakes in reading the numbers because they’re already tired,” Dela Cruz, who is also the PPCRV’s legal counsel, told reporters on Saturday.

The Comelec, which is canvassing the results of the senatorial and party-list representatives, said it had already tallied 86 percent of the 173 expected certificates of canvass (COCs) but the poll body opted to proclaim winning senators and party-list representatives “early next week.”

On track

“We are on track and we project early next week as our timeline for the proclamation,” Rex Laudiangco, acting spokesperson for the Comelec, said on Saturday on the sidelines of the canvassing at the Philippine International Convention Center.

“The intention is to proclaim altogether the 12 winning senatorial candidates” out of the 64 candidates, he added.

149 COCs tallied

The Comelec, sitting as the National Board of Canvassers (NBOC) for the senatorial and party-list results, has already tallied 149 of the total 173 COCs although the 12 winning senators have been known since the day after the elections based on ERs transmitted from polling precincts to the Comelec transparency server.

The 24 COCs, which the NBOC has still not received consist of the COCs from Lanao del Sur, the country’s consulate in Hong Kong, and the embassy in Amman, Jordan, which will be transmitted electronically, and the COCs from foreign posts, which will be delivered personally to the Comelec.

For party-list winners, Laudiangco said the Comelec was considering whether to hold a partial proclamation of the “top tier” party-list groups.

Although more than 50 million votes cast have been officially counted for the senatorial and party-list race, the Comelec will hold special elections for around 10,000 voters in Lanao del Sur and Shanghai, China, who were not able to vote.

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