LP to Comelec: Probe 7-hour data outage

MANILA, Philippines — The Liberal Party yesterday asked the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to look into the glitches that marred last Monday’s elections.

In a four-page manifestation and motion, the LP pushed for the creation of an independent body to investigate the alleged irregularity in the seven-hour data outage of the transparency servers.

Several cases of defective vote-counting machines (VCMs) and malfunctioning secure digital (SD) cards were reported in polling precincts.

The political party, led by its president Sen. Francis Pangilinan and secretary general Rep. Jose Christopher Belmonte, also asked the poll body to identify the areas where the defective VCMs and SD cards were deployed.

It sought the release of transparency servers’ audit and system logs, as well as the full technical report of the glitches.

A joint congressional probe into the technical glitches that raised questions on the integrity of the recent polls is set on June 4.

A total of 961 – a little more than one percent – of 85,769 VCMs for this year’s elections were defective, according to the Comelec.

This was higher than the 801 machines that suffered glitches in the 2016 presidential elections, poll officials said.

On the other hand, the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) said they are targeting to complete reviewing the logs from the transparency server this weekend to determine if there were irregularities in the transmission of votes.

PPCRV national chair Myla Villanueva said Comelec furnished them a copy of the logs from its transparency server.  

The PPCRV asked for copies of the logs to check what happened during the more than seven-hour delay in the electronic transmission of votes from 6 p.m. last Monday until almost 2 a.m. the following day.

“We are hoping to finish it by this weekend, we will not stop… so that by next week we would already be calm and in case there was no anomalies and if there are anomalies I could report it,” Villanueva said.

She said the PPCRV will also determine what really happened when they stopped receiving the votes.

“We are going to check the logs. Why did the server stop giving us data to show in the tally boards? What went wrong?” Villanueva remarked.

She said they aim to check if all the data in the transparency server are complete.

Villanueva said they have already started checking the logs given by the Comelec to the PPCRV Command Center. Aside from the experts of the PPCRV, they are also consulting other experts for advice “so we would know if we are using the right approach, that is what we call peer review.”

So far the review is “looking good,” she said.

“It seems we were given complete data, the logs that were given to us was a big volume. There is so much information so we are happy that the information is that big, but it would take us time to sift through it,” she added.

As of midnight Friday, the PPCRV said they have received 23,033 election returns (ERs), which is 26.31 percent of the total 87,540 clustered precincts.

Comelec, meanwhile, belied the claims of the National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel) that it was not aware of the transmission router solution in the transparency server used in this polls.

Comelec spokesman James Jimenez said such a statement was “kind of surprising” because they have minutes to prove that Namfrel was present during the meeting where it was discussed.  

“At the proper time, we will release these minutes to the public. Right now we are preparing a chronology of events relative to the conduct of the elections so that we will know when decisions were made,” Jimenez said.

Jimenez likened the transmission router to a traffic cop to regulate the flow of incoming data to prevent overclogging. He stressed the router is not a facility to store data.

“This (router) was voted on and Namfrel was actually part of the voting… The results of the voting was unanimous. So again, we don’t know where they are coming from but again, where we are coming from, we have receipts,” Jimenez said. – With Evelyn Macairan, Sheila Crisostomo