MANILA — Church-backed poll watchdog Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) on Friday wrapped up its parallel count after 6 weeks at the Pope Pius Catholic Center in Manila City.

PPCRV's mandate is to check against transmission fraud when the election returns (ERs) go into cyberspace and protect the votes against "dagdag-bawas" or vote-shaving.

Their volunteers manually encoded copies of ERs and check it against the electronically transmitted results by the Vote Counting Machines (VCMs).

PPCRV received and encoded 90 percent of the 107,785 election returns in the country and overseas. The match rate between encoded and validated ERs and the VCM results remained high at 98.6 percent.

The 1.4 percent difference are those that do not have an equivalent electronically-transmitted result, typographical errors, and those that do not match.

The PPCRV found eight ERs that need a deeper probe by the Commission on Elections (Comelec).

They will submit their 2022 final match rate results and audit reports to the Comelec. The poll watcher takes pride in its unofficial parallel count's 99.995% accuracy rate in the 2019 results.

The national ER copies will be stored in a small room at the Pope Pius Catholic Center for six years, while PPCRV will send local ERs back to the regions.

The ERs of the 2016 elections were already disposed of as of last Monday.

Archiving is done to easily recover the election returns if an electoral protest is filed, PPCRV spokesperson Vann dela Cruz said.

Meanwhile, the random manual audit of ballots still has until June 21 to complete the remaining randomly selected 757 boxes. A random manual audit checks the performance of VCMs and examines ballots to validate accuracy.

"We are down to 69 boxes and we are deploying 30 teams and given po yung flattened na yung learning curve ng ating teams ay kayang kaya na po nila matapos yung remaining ballot boxes given the remaining days," said Atty. Helen Graido, LENTE Consultant for Policy and Legislation.

Comelec leads the random manual audit, while poll watchdog Legal Network for Truthful Elections (LENTE), an association of certified public accountants, and the Philippine Statistics Authority are auditing the ballots.

For this election year, the group deployed 18 Certified Public Accountants to audit the votes and oversee groups of verifiers.

"Kailangan ang CPA because the nature of our work typically audit we audit in my previous work we audit financials." volunteer CPA Rusty Suarez said.

The group plans to submit the final match results and other audit reports by August.

“Klaro na ang random manual audit hindi po siya para magproklama ng panalo or magsabing may natalo. Ito ay pagtingin sa performance sa pagbabasa ng makina sa boto ng mga tao," Graido said.

After the June 21 final audit day, the ballot boxes will be delivered back to the local districts for safekeeping for the next six years.

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