PPCRV starts manual auditing of election returns

The Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) started on Tuesday its unofficial manual audit of election returns (ERs).

The manual audit is the other half of the unofficial electronic tally. Together, they make up one of the PPCRV's mandates as the citizen's arm of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) for the 2013 midterm elections.

The manual audit involves the delivery of copies of ERs, which are printed out before Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines start their electronic transmission to the Comelec's transparency server.

The tangible ERs are brought the PPCRV's command center at the Pope Pius XII Center in Manila, where they will be encoded two times in computers by PPCRV volunteers.

The PPCRV then verifies the encoded ERs, after which these will be matched against the electronic partial and unofficial tally.

Purest form of data

PPCRV media director Ana de Villa-Singson highlighted the importance of ERs in verifying election anomalies, calling them the "purest, cleanest form of data."

"[ERs are] pre-transmission. They are printed prior to transmission, which makes them the purest, cleanest form of data because it did not pass through transmission yet, which is the most vulnerable time should there be any manipulation of the data," De Villa-Singson said.

The PPCRV has been updating the public with its partial and unofficial tally since voting for the 2013 polls stopped at 7 p.m. Monday and several transmissions sent data soon after.

As of 4:40 p.m. on Tuesday, the PPCRV’s partial and unofficial tally showed that 53,818 of 78,166 clustered precincts were counted.

De Villa-Singson said the PPCRV has received ERs from several areas in Luzon and Visayas, while some ERs from Mindanao are expected by Wednesday.

De Villa-Singson said the PPCRV will give updates from time to time about the progress of the manual audit. For now, it has yet to get enough data for the group to start announcements on the matter.

"We will tell you how many of the manually encoded data, how many of the ERs have already been received, how many of the ERs have already been encoded," De Villa-Singson told the media.

She added that the PPCRV hopes to encode around 4,000 at the least and 6,000 at the most on a daily basis.

De Villa-Singson said the PPCRV hopes for a consistent count with this manual audit.

"In a perfect world both of them should be the same. That is what we are hoping for in this count. But if there are incidents where there are differences then it is PPCRV’s duty to report that to Comelec, find some answers and justifications that are clear and acceptable to all of us," she said. — Gian Geronimo/KBK, GMA News