PPCRV to end parallel count Wednesday morning

Election watchdog Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) is set to wrap up its operations on the May 10 polls Wednesday morning. PPCRV media communications director Ana de Villa-Singson said they have already received 90.02 percent of the votes transmitted from Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines, the technology used in the May 10 automated elections. At present, Singson said they are in the process of finalizing the data that will be submitted to the Commission on Elections (Comelec). PPCRV is the accredited citizens’ arm of the Comelec in the May 10 elections, which was conducted electronically on a nationwide scale for the first time. The watchdog will shut down its operations at 11 a.m.

Singson said PPCRV operations would be transferred to a much smaller room also within the Pope Pius building so that they could still continue receiving data sent by transmission from PCOS machines. Senator Benigno “Noynoy" Aquino III continued to lead the PPCRV tally for presidential candidates as of 12:50 p.m. Tuesday with 13,841,583 votes over former President Joseph Estrada’s 8,758,489. Estrada’s running-mate Makati mayor Jejomar Binay, meanwhile, was still ahead in the vice presidential race with 13,491,946 votes compared to Senator Manuel Roxas II’s 12,679,635. As for the random manual audit (RMA), Singson said they have already received about 70,000 out of the 76,475 clustered precincts from different parts of the country, and that they have encoded more than 50 percent of it. She said they are hoping to hit 65 to 70 percent before they stopped operations, which she said is sufficient to determine the integrity of the election returns when compared to the transmission of Comelec. - KBK, GMANews.TV