NO ANOMALY, PPCRV INSISTS
AMID suspicions of rigging, the Parish Pastoral Counting for Responsible Voting ( PPRCV) on Saturday insisted that no cheating occurred during the unofficial and partial counting of votes conducted by the group since Monday.
PPCRV communications direc- tor Ana de Villa-Singson said no anomaly took place as proven in the “anomaly tests” conducted by PPRCV’s information and technology (IT) experts.
Singson said their experts made sure that the data transmitted by the vote counting machines were untouched, thus the votes that went to Camarines Sur Rep. Leni Robredo, Liberal Party candidate for vice president, were not padded.
Singson said the PPCRV was not an instrument to cheat Sen. Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.
“We ran several anomaly tests to demonstrate the credibility No single anomaly was found,” she asserted.
Singson pointed out that the anomaly tests were conducted in
order to prove that there was no anomaly in the group’s count. She stressed that the PPCRV is standing by the correctness and validity of its performance of the job given to them by the Commission on Elections (Comelec).
The PPCRV is a Catholic churchbased election watchdog.
On Wednesday, Marcos’s lawyer Francesca Huang said a new “script” or computer command was placed on the PPRCV transparency server at around 7:30 p.m. on Monday that changed the hash codes of the packet data.
The replacement of hash code led the Marcos camp to suspect that the results of the elections, particularly in the vice presidential race, were rigged.
The Comelec had claimed that it was not informed about the changing of the script by Smartmatic.
The National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL) earlier said a hash code serves as a digital fingerprint, which is unique for every file document.
At the same time, it is “a security measure used to ensure that the integrity of an electronic docu-ment, data file, or a program has not been compromised,” NAMFREL said.
On Thursday, Comelec Chairman Andres Bautista admitted that the hash code was replaced but this did not affect the number of votes of any candidate.
But the Marcos camp noted that after the script was inserted, the senator’s lead of almost one million vote was erased and by dawn on Tuesday, Robredo was already leading by 200,000 votes.
But the Comelec and poll technology contractor Smartmatic shrugged off Marcos’ claim, saying the alteration was meant to replace question mark (“?”) in the names of candidates with “ñ.”