PPCRV shuts down command center

MANILA, Philippines - The Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) is set to close its command center today as it aims to finish the encoding of votes from almost 80,000 polling precincts.

The PPCRV closes today its command center at the Pope Pius XII Center on UN Avenue in Manila after 24 days of doing partial and unofficial counting of votes. Its quick count of transmitted votes covered 96.14 percent of the total.

PPCRV communications director Ana de Villa-Singson said as of yesterday they have already encoded about 73,000 of the election returns (ERs) sent to the PPCRV. There are still 3,000 remaining ERs to be encoded.

She said volunteers would be able to finish encoding the remaining ERs today. “For sure we would finish all of that.”

The PPCRV, the accredited citizens arm of the Commission on Elections (Comelec), receives the fourth copy of the first eight ERs printed by the vote counting machines prior to transmission.

However, Singson explained that not all the ERs reached the PPCRV because there were cases when the board of election inspectors (BEIs) did not follow the general instruction, which was to give copies of ERs to PPCRV poll watchers.

There were also election-related violence such as when PPCRV volunteer Eda Delia Olmida was killed in an ambush in Pagadian last May 9. Two bags of undetermined number of ERs she was carrying were forcibly taken by the assailants.

Singson also said they were “very happy” with the PPCRV volunteers’ performance this year. “I think we have more volunteers compared to the last election.”

There were 700,000 PPCRV volunteers for the May 9 elections, and 600 voluntary encoders showed up at the command center during the first four days of counting and more arrived in the succeeding days.

The PPCRV recorded the most number of encoded ERs in one day last May 17 – at 9,000 ERs.