MANILA—After receiving the audit logs of the transparency server from the Commission on Elections on Friday, the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) started looking into the cause of the 7-hour delay in the release of election results on Monday night.

• Comelec allows PPCRV access to transparency server audit logs

According to PPCRV chairperson Myla Villanueva, the turnover of the logs was witnessed by PPCRV Chair Emeritus Amb. Henrietta De Villa, PPCRV IT expert and board member Dr. William Yu, members of the media and representatives of the different political parties.

The church-based election watchdog has now started looking into these logs.

“We’re hoping to finish it by this weekend. Hinahabol ko po ’yung mga activities next week para mahinahon na tayo kung saka-sakaling walang anomalya or masabi ko na kung meron man. And we’re hoping to do that on weekend. Hindi po tayo titigil,” Villanueva told the media at the PPCRV Command Center at the Pope Pius XII Catholic Center in Manila.

Villanueva said the group is looking into 3 things.

“Was transmission happening during the time that the data, or the tally boards were lost at 0.38% noong gabi po ng May 13? We’re going to do that by looking at the server logs and to see that data was actually coming in from our VCMs,” she said.

“The second thing we’re going to check for is the logs. Why did the servers stop giving us data to show in the tally boards? What went wrong?

“The third thing we’re going to watch for is the completeness of the data. And for that to be done, we have to wait for data from the central server of Comelec which is currently still operating and receiving data and therefore hindi pa po mabigay sa atin ng Comelec ang data na ’yun kasi may trabaho pa silang ginagawa. But in the future po, for completeness, ipagbabangga natin ’yung dalawang datos na ’yun.”

Villanueva said that a preliminary probe into the audit logs has so far revealed the data matched the data preliminarily available on the Comelec central server but will not make any conclusions until his group gets the actual data from the central server.

VALIDATION OF PRINTED ELECTION RETURNS

The PPCRV, meanwhile, is continuing its manual encoding of printed election returns for comparison with the electronically-transmitted data from the transparency server.

Villanueva said the PPCRV has so far finished validating 26,800 election returns representing 30.61 percent of the total clustered precincts.

“The data that we have in the transmission server matches 99.98 percent of the time of the ERs that we have checked here,” she said.

On Thursday, the PPCRV reported finding discrepancies in 2 election returns out of 8,000 they had validated at that time although PPCRV Media Director Agnes Gervacio was quick to point out that these will not affect the total tally, since these involves a difference of one vote for each of the 2 election returns.

Villanueva said his group hopes to be able to validate more than the 77,000 ERs they validated during the 2016 presidential polls.