The Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV), a poll watchdog supported by the Catholic Church, refuted allegations that it was involved in anomalies during the May 2022 elections.
“In the interest of truth and in defense of the thousands of PPCRV volunteers who gave time and resources to help ensure and verify the credibility of our elections, we feel it is our responsibility to refute the allegations alluded to PPCRV’s role in allegedly conditioning the public’s mind on the results of the election,” read the group’s statement released on Monday, November 14.
The group said it has been “dragged into the fray” between the Commission on Elections and former Information and Communications Secretary Eliseo Rio Jr. who raised concerns over the accuracy of the results of the national elections.
“The group has questioned the accuracy of the results of the election based on inconsistencies in the transmission of the results between the transparency server and the Commission on Elections’ Central Server and the ‘impossible’ speed with which the results were received by the transparency server, insinuating the existence of some anomaly in the 2022 elections,” read the PPCRV statement.
Rio filed last week a “mandamus” petition before the Supreme Court to preserve the transmission logs of the result of the elections, saying that the transparency server of the PPCRV saw peak transmission at 8:02 p.m. on May 9 but data from the Commission on Elections reached the highest volume at 9:30 p.m.
A mandamus petition seeks to order a tribunal, corporation, board, officer, or a person who neglects to perform an act mandated by law as a duty to do the required act.
The former government official questioned why the transparency server logged more than 20 million votes an hour after the voting closed while data from the poll body showed that only 12 million votes were transmitted during that period.
“It seems that the transparency server was conditioning the minds of the public as to what the official results will be,” Rio said as quoted in media reports.
The Commission on Elections earlier clarified that it owned and fully controlled the transparency server and had “full administrative and managerial control.”
