Commission on Elections (Comelec) Commissioner Marlon Casquejo said on Saturday, April 30 that they are confident that there will be no repeat of the seven-hour delay that occurred during the 2019 midterm elections.
It can be remembered that in the 2019 polls, a technical glitch was encountered by the poll body’s file transfer protocol (FTP) application which resulted in a seven-hour delay in the transmission of votes to the transparency server.
"Nagkaroon tayo ng stress test...sending 100,000 or 50,000 results sabay-sabay at di naman po nagkaroon ng problema dun. Hindi naman po tayo nabilaukan (We had a stress test...sending 100,000 or 50,000 results all at the same time and did not encounter any problem. There was no bottleneck)," he said.
"So we are confident that the hardware component as well as the software component malaki na yung capacity and hindi na mangyayari yung sinasabing (has a larger capacity and there will be no repeat of the so-called) seven-hour glitch. We are confident for that," he added.
In case problems will occur, which according to Casquejo will be unavoidable, the transparency server will not be tinkered with. He said that they will have contingency measures for problems as with what happened in 2019.
During the 2019 incident, Casquejo said that the system only needed to be rebooted for it to work again. Accordingly, the transmission of votes was stuck at 0.38 percent. When the transmission resumed around 1 a.m., it had already displayed 90.57 percent of the total number of votes.
Why did it take so long to do that? Casquejo said that the permission of the Commission En Banc was needed first. He said that they come up with a resolution that will allow technology group heads to fix simple issues such as those as long as there will be no changing of source codes.
"Kung kaya niyang (If he can) iresolve by turning it off and turning it on, then why not? Bakit pa natin hihintayin yung ating (Why do we need to wait for an) en banc resolution?" he said.
"Pero kapag talagang may tatanggalin, may aayusin na codes, ibang usapan na 'yun (But if something needs to be removed, codes to be fixed, then that's a different story)," he added.
Casquejo assured that the transparency server will not be tampered with.