PPCRV: Eleksyon 2022 was clean and credible

Church-based poll watcher organization Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) said on Saturday that the recent May 9 polls were “clean and credible” amid the country’s battle against the COVID-19 pandemic and some vote counting machines malfunctioning on Election Day.

Dr. William Yu, co-IT director of the PPCRV, said the machine failures were expected as they had been used on several previous elections.

“So based on what we have seen, we can make conclusions based on observations we have, yes it was clean and credible. With respect to the technology, I mean it is the best we can expect from the technology considering they have been used for three elections already,” Yu said at the Pandesal Forum.

“So the machine failures, for example, we have already warned people to expect them. Now, of course there are areas for improvement, for example, in terms of logistics and how the elections was run, to make them better. But in general we consider them clean and credible,” he added.

More than 1,800 VCMs malfunctioned on Election Day. However, the Commission on Elections said all these issues were “resolved.”

Yu added that they had also investigated "allegations" raised with the church-based poll watch group.

“For example, there is an accusation that elections in a particular town never occurred. So what we do [is] we check with our coordinators in that town if elections really occurred in that town. So these are things we can investigate if provided to us,” he explained.

Asked if they were satisfied with the credibility of the recent elections, Yu said the group was satisfied.

He, however, acknowledged that there were some areas that needed further investigation.

“Although there are some areas that require further investigation, [such as] signs of vote buying, disinformation and misinformation [is a] real topic. Its outside the voting process itself, but these are some things that we flagged because it is something that our volunteers see it as well. Having a large pool of volunteers nationwide give us visibility,” Yu explained.

The PPCRV co-IT director lauded this year’s elections as “more transparent and auditable,” noting that the process and procedures gave more visibility.

“This one (the recent election) was more transparent, much more auditable than, for example, than the 2010 elections. It may look the same because of the vote counting machine lahat... but in terms of process and procedures there is a lot of visibility now,” he added.

Yu said they still have at least 257 election returns for verification, while they have verified 88,096 clustered precincts with 81.73% matched as of June 16. — DVM, GMA News