Comelec denies vote discrepancy in partial, unofficial count

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Comelec headquarters in Intramuros, Manila. INQUIRER FILES

MANILA, Philippines — The Commission on Elections (Comelec) denied on Tuesday the alleged discrepancy with the partial and unofficial results of the midterm polls.

Comelec Chairman George Erwin Garcia made the remark during a press conference at the Manila Hotel Tent City as reports surfaced alleging a reduction of up to five million votes for candidates early Tuesday morning.

Garcia said the fault lies with the receiving end — that is the media and other parties, whose software programs did not have proper filtering of duplicate entries which were transmitted from the clustered precincts.

The chart shows a sharp drop in the partial and unofficial results due to the removal of duplicated entries, according to the Commission on Elections.

“The [partial and unofficial] count had an excess of five million because of this — because the [entities and parties] did not have a program that would filter the duplicate [entries] as a result of processing,” Garcia said.

“That’s what I want to explain: there is no dagdag-bawas going on,” he said, referring to the padding and shaving of votes.

Comelec’s transparency server showed that up to around five million votes were deducted from 12:23 a.m. to 4:03 a.m., according to  INQUIRER.net’s tally.

Despite this, the Magic 12 rankings remained unchanged during the specified period, according to this publication’s tally.

Danilo Arao, convenor of poll watchdog Kontra Daya, told INQUIRER.net: “Comelec should be straightforward with the explanation.”

“How can this happen in a ‘send-to-all’ function and where ACMs are expected to transmit results only once. If this is a case of duplicated files, how did this happen? No one or no server should traffic transmissions as the transmission from the ACM is sent to the designated recipients directly.” /das/abc