PPCRV receives transparency server logs

Election watchdog Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) has received the transparency server logs it requested from the Commission on Elections (Comelec), the organization's chair said Friday.

The PPCRV received a large volume of the logs on Friday morning and will work over the weekend to review the data, chair Myla Villanueva told reporters.

The watchdog had asked the Comelec for access to the transparency server logs after a 7-hour delay in the display of partial, unofficial midterm election results in the tally boards of the PPCRV and of media outlets on Monday night. Their request was granted Thursday.

Comelec spokesman James Jimenez said the delay was caused by an issue in the application that pushes data from the transparency server, one of the three servers receiving transmissions from vote-counting machines, to the media.

Now that the PPCRV has the logs, Villanueva said their IT team will look into whether or not transmission continued in the seven hours the tally boards were stuck at initial figures, and why the transparency server stopped providing data.

She said the PPCRV will also check if the data is complete, but added they have to wait for information coming from the Comelec's central server, which they also requested.

"We're hoping to finish it by this weekend," Villanueva said.

Meanwhile, the poll watchdog has "validated" 26,800 physical election returns, representing 30.61% of 87,540 expected returns, she said.

Volunteers manually encode physical election returns, which were printed before vote-counting machines transmitted data to the servers, for checking against the electronically transmitted results.

So far, the match rate between the physical election returns and the electronically transmitted results is 99.98%, she said.

"For me, that's fine. There's no significant problem," Villanueva said. — RSJ, GMA News