The Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting will continue validating election returns even after the proclamation of winning candidates in the midterm elections.
However, PPCRV national chairperson Myla Villanueva said the digitally transmitted election returns will stop coming in once the proclamation begins.
“We don’t have to be 100 percent. That count (electronic transmission) is finished. We are unofficial. So our work, it’s here (election return validation),” she said.
Election returns from only 1,356 clustered precincts have yet to be transmitted as of 12:10 p.m. yesterday.
Villanueva said the election return validation is still relevant because through this, the public will know if there was any instance of vote shaving or vote padding during the elections.
She also said that it was important to finish the election return validation to honor the PPCRV volunteers’ work. “I saw how hard the volunteers worked and I owe it to them to tell them that we are still guarding here,” she said.
The PPCRV will receive the fourth copy of the election returns which 300 volunteers per day will manually encode at its command center at Pope Pius XII Catholic Center in Manila. The encoded data will be compared with the digitally transmitted data to ensure that it matches and that there are no discrepancies in the data.
Villanueva said it could take them two to three weeks to finish with the election return validation.
The PPCRV official said they want to maintain a high level of match rate with the validation of election returns.
Villanueva said that they were at a 99.98 percent match rate as of Friday afternoon. (Minka Tiangco)