PPCRV ends operations for validation of election returns

MANILA, Philippines — Twenty-six days after they began validating the election returns (ERs), an official of the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) yesterday said they have completed the task and there was no incident of “dagdag bawas” or vote buying and shaving involved in the senatorial race. 

PPCRV board member Arwin Serrano said while they would still come up with a final report on the mid-term elections, at first look he did not notice any “dagdag-bawas” incident.

“In fact, for the 12 winning senators, there was no change in their ranking,” Serrano said.

The election watchdog completed validating and encoding the fourth copy of the pre-transmitted ERs at around 4 a.m. yesterday.

Serrano said of the expected 85,769 ERs printed by the vote counting machines (VCMs), the PPCRV only collected 62,052 or 72 percent. 

The 72 percent is lower than the ERs received by the PPCRV during the 2016 presidential polls that reached more than 80 percent. 

Serrano expressed belief that some of their volunteers might have had a hard time retrieving the ERs from polling precincts.  

“My personal observation on why the number of ERs is lower this year is because in the 2016 General Instruction, the name of our organization was written there. This year, it only stated ‘accredited citizen’s arm.’ While we have experienced similar incidents before, for this year, there are more who may have refused to give the fourth copy of the pre-transmitted ERs to the PPCRV or they may have sought clearance from their principal,” Serrano said.

“I would like to thank our volunteers who have been with us up until this early morning to encode the ERs. They come from different walks of life, from parishes, schools and offices and most of them belonged to the youth,” Serrano said.

More electoral protests are expected to be filed due to technical glitches that occurred on election day, an elections lawyer said yesterday.   

Emil Marañon III said many losing candidates are expected to file protests in connection with the recent elections. 

“In my personal observation, there will be more cases to be filed this year because primarily of the seven-hour lag in the transparency server.  Although, that has no relationship with the official count, it triggers a lot of suspicions, a lot of doubts, especially among losing candidates,” Marañon told The STAR.

He was referring to the seven-hour glitch in the transparency server of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) that was sending unofficial results to the PPCRV and media groups that were doing quick counts on the night after the election.

The Comelec had brushed aside allegations of fraud as it blamed the delay to the “bottlenecking” of data inflow to the server.

Marañon said because of the glitches, even candidates who lost by large margins are now filing cases.  – With Sheila Crisostomo