Read this in the online edition of The Manila Times.
The head of the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) has defended the group’s role in verifying election results, following an assertion that one candidate’s votes were counted in favor of another.
PPCRV President Myla Villanueva said in a statement Monday that the group does not audit actual ballots.
“This is not our mandate. It is our friends at Namfrel (Citizens National Movement for Free Elections) and Lente (Legal Network for Truthful Elections) who are actually doing this as we speak,” Villanueva said.
What the PPCRV does is check to see if fraud was committed while the election results or ERs are being broadcast, he said.
“We compared pre-transmission ERs with post-transmission ERs,” he said. “Along with others, it’s a holistic audit of the process, in any election cycle.” Villanueva responded to the statement of Freddy Olbes, who assured that last Thursday he worked as a volunteer at the PPCRV Command Center of the Santo Tomás University.
“I was under the impression that we were going to code individual ballot receipts from the different precincts that were supposedly randomly selected across the country and come up with our own totals,” Olbes said. “So I was surprised and disappointed to discover that what we were coding were the precinct totals already added up from the election results delivered by Comelec (Election Commission), the very body whose results we were apparently investigating.” He said that what the volunteers were doing “was like examining the veracity of an original document by reading its carbon copy. In short, we were acting as representatives of Comelec.” [and by inference the government’s] rubber stamp.” Villanueva flatly denied that the PPCRV was a mere Comelec rubber stamp.
“We owe it to the 500,000 lay volunteers and coordinators in our parishes across the country, some of whom prepared for over a year to help protect their votes on Election Day, to explain why they have sacrificed.” , said. “These are mostly young volunteers from parishes who have given their time and love for free. They were right there with you in the precincts. In addition, the IT-savvy volunteers also did tedious source code reviews and monitored the final tests and seals.” to ensure the VCMs (vote counting machines) actually counted correctly before voting. This work is not just now, it has been going on for over a year, for you, our voter.” Villanueva denied that “dagdag bawas” or manipulation of the difference in the number of votes to favor certain candidates had occurred while the results were being broadcast.
“A match means there were no dagdag-bawas in cyberspace. The match rate was 99,995 in 2019,” Villanueva said.
She said she did some coding herself, “sometimes as late as 3 a.m. It’s cathartic after a year and a half of planning to see how we achieve, through the hands-on work of our volunteers, what message our communities are sending to the country through of their votes.” PPCRV Trustee William Yu said the apparent “unevenness” in the parallel count could be due to human error, particularly in data coding.
“The more we encode, the more errors we expect. That’s not unusual. The mismatch could be caused by tired eyes,” Yu said at the PPCRV command center.
Yu echoed Villanueva’s statement that the 1.61 percent mismatch discovered over the weekend may be due to “typographical errors” made by volunteers.
Van de la Cruz, the spokesman for the electoral watchdog, also pointed out that fatigue is the possible reason for the small disparity in the figures, especially since the PPCRV coders exceed twice the date provided.
“The PPCRV is not only counting the election results, but we are actually comparing the actual physical election results with the broadcast election results, which we are not required by law to do,” de la Cruz said at the same briefing.
“That is born from the promotion, the pure volunteering and the effort of all our volunteers,” he added.
Olbes’ claim has not disturbed the parallel count of the PPCRV.
As of 10:30 am Monday, it has received results from 66,574 of the 107,785 polling stations, or 61.77 percent.
In its 5 p.m. bulletin Monday, the group reported receiving 62,752 of 107,785 returns, with 47,112 of them encrypted. Northern and Southern Luzon had the highest number of returns with a combined total of 40,292; followed by Visayas with 11,614; National Capital Region with 10,033; and Mindanao with 4,635.
Reference-www.manilatimes.net