Comelec: No delay, discrepancies in transmission of poll results

MANILA, Philippines — The Commission on Elections (Comelec) refuted allegations of delays and discrepancies in the transmission and canvassing of votes during the recent elections, amid concerns raised by watchdog groups and reports from media organizations.

Comelec Chairman George Garcia emphasized that the poll body’s servers began receiving election results as early as 7 p.m. on election day Monday, contradicting reports of transmission delays.

Garcia explained that variations in the speed of data reception among entities, such as media, poll watchdogs and political parties, are normal, often differing by mere seconds or minutes.

The Comelec chief stressed that data transmitted to various stakeholders, including media, citizens’ arms and political parties, are on a per-precinct basis and are not aggregated by province, city or municipality.

He reiterated that only the Comelec receives human-readable election returns (ERs), while other groups receive machine-readable data that must be cleaned to prevent duplication.

In an interview with “Storycon” on One News, he also dismissed allegations of vote-rigging, denying rumors that the Comelec had a duplicate transmission involving around five million votes.

“That is a false accusation…. We are not allowed to sum up and make rankings of votes because it is unofficial. We don’t have the total. Those issuing sum total are the media entities who are taking them from their transmission. It is not the Comelec’s server, but the media server,” Garcia said.

He also attributed some media-reported inconsistencies to unfiltered or “uncleaned” data extracted from transmission servers.

In contrast, the Comelec’s data is already validated and does not require such cleaning.

“There is a big television network that does not have a program for the cleaning of transmission… Early dawn today, we made them realize that what they released was wrong because what they released has double transmission. When they managed to clean, the votes that they reflected were reduced,” he revealed. — Daphne Galvez, Evelyn Macairan, Jose Rodel Clapano, Neil Jayson Servallos, Mayen Jaymalin