The initial findings made by the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) over the glitch in the transparency server proves that no fraud has been committed in transmitting the election results, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) said Tuesday.
The PPCRV, which is conducting a parallel count, revealed on Monday that it found out that the transparency server experienced a “bottleneck” which caused a seven-hour delay in the release of election results.
The church-based poll watchdog added that the data found in the transparency server matched the data “scraped” from the Comelec’s public access website.
“What they are saying is walang naging problema sa transmission. Walang nawala,” Comelec spokesman James Jimenez told reporters.
“Yung all of the fears na sinasabi ay wala naman basis,” he stated.
The seven-hour glitch took place following the 6 p.m. closing of the election day last May 13 which caused concerns for candidates and a number groups who suspected that fraud may have occurred.
Jimenez noted that this was the first time the transparency server experienced a glitch.
“Because this is the first time we are using the FTP (file transfer protocol) application,” he admitted.
Jimenez recounted that in the past elections, the Comelec just loaded the data from the transparency server into a USB stick.
The spokesman assured that using the FTP application was more secure than just using a USB stick.
“FTP was considered the superior solution. Ang problema nga using the FTP has caused bottlenecks,” he said.
In the meantime, PPCRV National Chairperson Myla Villanueva said the poll watchdog has asked the Comelec for the transmission router logs and data from the central server for further investigation.
Villanueva said the PPCRV is in no position to determine the root cause of the bottleneck and if fraud was still possible because of the technical glitch. (Jeffrey Damicog)
