Garcia says no delay in Comelec transmissions: It started after 7 p.m.
George Erwin Garcia
—NIÑO JESUS ORBETA
MANILA, Philippines — There was no delay between the transmission of votes from polling precincts to the Commission on Elections (Comelec) servers, with Comelec Chairperson George Garcia saying that tallies started coming after 7:00 p.m. on Monday or when voting hours closed.
Garcia during an ambush interview at the Chairman’s lounge at the Palacio del Gobernador said that the delays experienced by transparency servers supposed to do quick partial, unofficial counts were not shared by Comelec.
The Comelec chief was quizzed after several servers monitored by media outfits, the majority and minority parties, and poll watchdogs like the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) did not show partial and unofficial results even after 8:00 p.m. — or one hour after most polling precincts closed.
“We did not experience any delay, we have been here since 7 o’clock, since 7 o’clock when voting closed, and we can see on the other TV monitor that we are getting results, on a percentage basis,” Garcia told reporters in Filipino.
“So as of now it is at 72 percent already. So we do not have any delay in the transmission and at the same time, we have released the results,” he added in Filipino.
According to Garcia, the difference between Comelec’s data which has been entering its servers and that of the PPCRV and other monitoring sites is that Comelec cannot turn their data into a scoreboard of who has the most votes for the Senate race, because official tallies from Comelec would have to be released by the National Board of Canvassers (NBOC).
“The only difference is we cannot release partial results, total results. We do not have rankings, because what happens is that these numbers from our (transparency) servers are partial and unofficial. We cannot do that because remember, the official result comes from the canvassing done by the National Board of Canvassers,” Garcia added.
“Our numbers are for public consumption. Now, we can see that the ERs are there, the website of Comelec, you can also see that. So for the election returns, for example, we can see election returns of Cavite, Tagaytay for example, they can compared that if it will correspond to the ones sent to the media server, those sent to the PPCRV server,” he added.
Initially, there were reports that PPCRV and the other servers have not yet received tallies due to a supposed technical problem. This however prompted questions whether there would be a repeat of the 2019 midterm elections — where a glitch saw zero transmittals for at least seven hours.
READ: Comelec blames ‘bottleneck’ for 7-hour server delay
However, partial and unofficial results started to come in before 8:30 p.m.
As of 10.18 p.m., the Comelec transparency server showed that incumbent Senator Bong Go still leads the race with over 24.5 million votes, followed by former Senator Bam Aquino with 19.4 million votes, and Senator Ronald dela Rosa at 18.7 million votes.
READ: Go, Aquino, Dela Rosa top Senate race in partial, unofficial results
After the partial top three, the following candidates round out the Magic 12:
- ACT-CIS Rep. Erwin Tulfo – 15.6 million
- former Senator Kiko Pangilinan – 14.1 million
- Sagip party-list Rep. Rodante Marcoleta – 13.9 million
- former Senator Ping Lacson – 13.9 million
- former Senate President Tito Sotto – 13.6 million
- Senator Pia Cayetano – 13.3 million
- Deputy Speaker Camille Villar – 12.3 million
- Senator Imee Marcos – 12.1 million
- Senator Lito Lapid – 12.0 milion
