(UPDATE) THE Commission on Elections (Comelec) on Thursday said programming errors led to the discrepancies pointed out by the election watchdog Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV).
THE Commission on Elections on Thursday said programming errors led to the discrepancies pointed out by the election watchdog Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting . Comelec Chairman George Erwin Garcia said the problem was 'more or less' similar to the reported 5 million votes difference between the Comelec transparency server and the Media server.
'More or less it was the same. It needs to be fixed. It's a matter of programming. You have to prepare the right program,' Garcia said. On Thursday, the PPCRV said it received word from its Zamboanga City and Dumaguete City coordinators that some of the valid ballots that were cast were higher than the number of voters who actually voted. Speaking to reporters at their Command Center, a spokesman for the PPCRV, Ana Singson, said they want to understand what happened. Singson showed that according to the Comelec website, in the precinct in Barangay Lamisahan, Zamboanga City, 919 valid ballots were cast when there were 768 registered voters who voted out of 992 total registered voters. In Dumaguete, the voting center in Calindagan originally recorded 956 ballots cast when there were just 814 out of 930 registered voters in that precinct. It was later corrected to reflect the number of those who voted. The spokesman said they had been in constant communication with the Comelec over the discrepancy, and said these figures were 'mislabeled.' 'Apparently, the data that was pointed for that particular cell was not supposed to be for that cell. So we want to understand a little bit more about that 'mislabeling' piece, and we're doing this so that there can be no cloud of doubt in our election ... we want to make sure that everything is explained,' she said. Singson said it is not clear if there are other cities that also had similar issues. She also said they could not conclude that votes were being manipulated until all the audits are done. 'I was very careful to say that we should not say there is dagdag-bawas at this point. We have audits to tell us that, and it is very easy for us to say if this is wrong or right because we are holding the physical ERs here in our command center, and the physical ERs, once they arrive from Zamboanga and Dumaguete, we're really going to check how many ballots were cast, how many voters really voted, that will come out all in the ERs, and that is the beauty of the unofficial parallel count,' Singson told The Manila Times in a chance interview. In a later briefing, PPCRV Executive Director Jude Liao said while the Comelec already corrected the mislabeled figures on the website, the council has yet to receive a formal explanation from the Comelec, as of press time. 'There is an initial explanation, but there is yet to be a formal explanation to the mislabeling , so the response is still that it was mislabeled,' he said. Garcia said the figures have already been reconciled, and the matter has been discussed with PPCRV Chairman Myla Villanueva. 'On the same night , it was corrected. If you look at the figures, the number of voters who actually voted and the numbers of ballots cast are the same,' he added. 'The votes did not change. Corrections were made on that item in the programming, but it does not change the votes simply because the votes at 7 p.m. were already sent to all servers, and were seen by everybody on the Comelec website,' Garcia said. He pointed out that the Comelec does not correct any disparities, noting that its website only posts the number of voters without a running total.
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