By Minka Klaudia Tiangco

The Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) confirmed that the transparency server did experience a "bottleneck" on data on election day which caused a seven-hour delay in the release of election results.

PPCRV National Chairperson Myla Villanueva said that after their team of IT experts inspected the transparency server, it was found that the File Transfer Manager Module, which is the application that releases the data on the tally boards, was defective.

"When we looked at it, we saw that there was a job to push the data to us, and that File Transfer Manager was not completing the job. It started but it did not complete it. That, obviously, is a cause of a bottleneck," she said.

It was also found that data was still transmitting even during the technical glitch. Villanueva added that the data in the transparency server matched with the data "scraped" from the Commission on Elections' (Comelec) public access website.

"We took the time stamps from the transparency server logs that we received and we compared that to the time stamps of the data that actually arrived at the transparency server between the hours of 6:15 and 1:19 a.m. and we matched those timestamps to each other, and we would like to tell the public that it actually matched," she said.

Earlier, PPCRV Board Member William Yu said 84 percent of votes from the 87,540 clustered precincts came in the transparency server five hours after the first transmission was received at about 6:15 p.m.

However, Villanueva said the PPCRV is "not in a position" to explain the root cause of the "bottleneck" issue and to confirm if fraud was possible because of the technical glitch.

The PPCRV official also refused to disclose if the faulty application was owned by the Comelec or a sub-contractor.

The Church-based poll watchdog group asked the Comelec for the transparency server logs after the delay in the release of election results.

Villanueva said that they are still asking the Comelec for the transmission router logs and data from the central server for further investigation.

She reminded the public that the election results are being validated through two processes: the election return validation by the PPCRV and the random manual audit (RMA) by the Legal Network for Truthful Elections (LENTE).

The PPCRV hosts hundreds of volunteers in their command center at Pope Pius XII Catholic Center in Manila every day to manually encode the fourth copy of the election returns. The encoded data will then be compared with the electronically transmitted results to ensure that there are no discrepancies.

Meanwhile, LENTE is conducting the RMA at the Manila Diamond Hotel to check results from the vote counting machines against 715 randomly-selected clustered precincts nationwide.

Villanueva said IT experts from media, political parties, and other poll watchdog groups can also ask the Comelec for the transparency server logs to do their own observations if they have doubts on the integrity of the elections.

"The PPCRV would like the technical people from the media and political parties to request the logs from the Comelec. They will provide the logs because they have a resolution about it. Then, we can compare our observations in the spirit of transparency," she said in Filipino.