PPCRV: ‘Bottleneck’ reason for 7-hour delay in unofficial tally display

Election watchdog Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) has echoed the Commission on Election's (Comelec) finding that a "bottleneck" in the transparency server caused the 7-hour delay in the display of the unofficial vote tally last May 13.

But PPCRV chair Myla Villanueva on Monday said the council is not in the position to divulge the reason behind the "bottleneck," leaving the Comelec to explain the technical glitch.

"The PPCRV is not in a position to declare or to conclude why the bottleneck happened. We can only say that the bottleneck happened," Villanueva told reporters.

Creating speculations of electoral fraud, media and PPCRV tally boards of unofficial poll results failed to display updated data for several hours on election night, an issue the Comelec said was caused by a problem in the application that pushes data from the transparency server to the media and the PPCRV.

The PPCRV requested and was granted the transparency server logs, which its IT experts studied over the weekend.

At a press briefing, Villanueva said their team found that the transparency server logs showed that the file transfer manager -- the application responsible for pushing the data in the server to the PPCRV and the media -- did not complete its task at the time.

She added that they found that data did come into the transparency server between 6:15 p.m. and 1:19 a.m., the time when the tally boards did not display new information, and that the data matched what they were able to scrape from the Comelec's Public Access website.

However, the PPCRV chair would not conclude if their findings proved or disproved speculations of fraud.

"Ang pinapakita po ng logs is yung behavior po ng makina na nagsasabi na nabubulunan nga ba or hindi. Hindi po nakikita sa logs kung bakit nabubulunan. At ang Comelec po ang dapat sumagot niyan kasi sa kanila po yung makina," she said.

Villanueva said the PPCRV has also asked the Comelec for a copy of transmission router logs and the official central server election data for further validation.

She also urged the media and political parties to request the transparency server logs from the Comelec so their IT experts may be able to weigh in on the issue, and for the public to continue watching the ongoing random manual audit.

Meanwhile, the PPCRV said it has received 41,948 of more than 85,000 expected election returns, or 48.91%, as of Monday noon.

The PPCRV's mandate is to check manually encoded election returns against electronically transmitted results to see if they would match, a measure that aims to reveal whether or not votes were added or subtracted during transmission. — RSJ, GMA News