COMELEC STARTS PROBE OF MISMATCHES IN SOME ELECTION RETURNS

The Commission on Elections (Comelec) has started to look into discrepancies that its citizen arm, the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) found in some election returns (ERs).

The ERs under investigation came from the latest findings in the manual validation process being done by the PPCRV, which found differences in the numbers reported to the public via the poll body’s transparency server and those in the ERs that will be one of the official bases of the winning candidate’s proclamation.

The questioned ERs were from four clustered precincts in the provinces of Quezon, Masbate and Cebu. They were among the 78,894 ERs that had been encoded by the PPCRV as of Friday afternoon.

Based on initial assessments, John Rex Laudiangco, acting spokesperson for the Comelec, said on Saturday that the discrepancies were due in one case to the sealing of vote-counting machines, while another was due to a “procedural error” after the clustered precinct’s electoral board “prematurely closed the voting.”

“One case is potentially an error on the part of the [electoral board] wherein they committed a procedural error and prematurely closed the voting leading to partial transmission, and of course, partial results in the ER. What the [electoral board] did, upon realizing their error, is to re-zero the machine, batch feed the ballots and close and transmit later on,” he said.

When asked if a violation was committed when the board batch-fed the ballots, Laudiangco said: “We cannot yet say that there [was] a violation on the part of the [election board] if the matter was duly reported and authority was sought therefore. These matters are ... part of the investigation.”

The election board in the fourth case is also being questioned because the printed election return copy of the Comelec’s election officer matched with the transmitted counterpart.

However, Laudiangco stressed that these are just “preliminary assessments and in no way the final results of the investigation.” He said that the final report would come from the Comelec’s information technology department.

A total of 107,785 printed copies of ERs are set to be manually checked against their digital counterpart by PPCRV volunteers. It has so far received 86.6 percent, or 93,347 ERs.

It has wrapped up operations at the University of Santo Tomas on Friday with only 73.2 percent encoded, but manual validation will resume at Pope Pius XII Center “as long as [PPCRV] get ERs,” its media director Angel Antonio said.

The PPCRV confirmed that it has received the transmission logs from the Comelec transparency server. But William Yu, board member of the PPCRV, said that it was still reviewing the logs and was too early to make a conclusion from it.

The transmission logs explain the computer’s activities that can show irregularities in the transmission of poll results.