Comelec to PPCRV: Explain vote discrepancies

MANILA, Philippines – The Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) should explain the alleged discrepancies in the votes garnered by party-list group Confederation of Non-Stock Savings and Loan Associations (CONSLA), the Commission on Elections (Comelec) said yesterday.

The party-list group’s letter was “pointing basically to the discrepancies” between the PPCRV’s partial unofficial counts and Comelec’s official counts, said Comelec spokesman James Jimenez.

“Recently, the PPCRV has admitted that there were some miscalculations on their part. So I think in the first instance the people who should do the explaining is the PPCRV. The one being questioned is their results, not ours,” he said. 

Last week, CONSLA had written the Comelec, seeking an investigation into the difference in the vote results between the poll body and the PPCRV.

CONSLA claimed that on May 9, it had a total of 342,513 votes based on PPCRV’s Quick Count. The following day, the group alleged that it was in 14th place with 523,753 votes at 11 a.m. and 555,896 votes at noon.

But based on Comelec’s official canvass, CONSLA only garnered a total of 213,814 votes.

PPCRV communications director Ana de Villa-Singson admitted on Monday that there was an error during the course of its quick count that might have led CONSLA to believe that it gained 555,986 votes, which was way more than what the Comelec had reported. 

The PPCRV sources its data from the Comelec’s transparency server.

“Our screens are networked. There was a networking connectivity issue rather than the data. The data was always correct. It’s just the connectivity issue that is why the ones projected on the screen were wrong,” Singson claimed. 

When the PPCRV noticed the discrepancy, it immediately corrected the error, she said.

Earlier, Arnold Arriola, a candidate for the party-list group Buhay, executed an affidavit attesting to the discrepancy on the votes garneted by CONSLA. He said he was able to take photos of the results generated by the PPCRV quick count.