The Commission on Elections (Comelec) has shut down operations of the transparency media server (TMS) at the Quadricentennial Pavilion, at the University of Santo Tomas on Friday, May 13.
In a letter signed by Director James Jimenez, all political parties, accredited media organizations and accredited citizens' arm were informed that the transparency media server room will be decommissioned.
Prior to the decommissioning, Comelec said that due notice was given to the accredited TMS end-users to observe the activity, and the following preparatory procedures were performed:
- Generation of the final precinct results from the transparency server;
- Send the final precinct results to media organization and political party workstations;
- Closing of the File Transfer Manager (FTM) application that generates precinct results from Transparency Server to Media Server,
- Re-format all the workstation and USB of the media organization and political party before pull-out;
- Gather all application and database logs of all servers and network equipment in the Transparency data center;
- Gather all application and database logs of all servers and network equipment in the Media server,
- Shutdown of the media servers and network equipment
Based on Comelec's data and the last feed from the transparency server, it has processed and was able to receive 98.35 percent of election returns. At the same venue, the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) is conducting a parallel count.
Through utilization of the transparency server, PPCRV conducts a matching of the electronically transmitted election returns (ERs) with the physically printed ones which are both generated by the Vote Counting Machines (VCMs).
Based on the last feed from the TMS, Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. is still leading the race for the country's top post with as much as 31,104,175 votes.
Comelec also announced that it will conduct a backup of the TMS on Saturday, May 14 at the same venue in UST.
On Saturday, May 14, Comelec performed the backing up of the media server logs, which was witnessed by the PPCRV and the National Citizens' Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL). After the back-up, the accredited political parties, media organizations and citizens' arm who were allotted workstations inside the TMS room may now begin the retrieval of their laptops and USBs.