Physical election returns received by the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) have reached 93,000 and over 78,000 of these were already encoded by volunteers.
Today, Friday, May 20, marks the end of PPCRV's operation at the Quadricentennial Pavilion at the University of Santo Tomas (UST) in Manila.
They wrapped their operations at the UST command center by receiving a total of 93,347 physical election returns. This is 86.6 percent of the total 107,785 election returns expected.
Of this, 78,894 or 73.20 percent have been encoded.
Of the poll returns encoded as of 5 p.m. Friday, 77,786 physical returns have matched their corresponding electronically transmitted returns. This translates to a 98.6 percent match rate.
The difference of 1,108 election returns, according to PPCRV legal director Vann Dela Cruz, are accounted for nine ERs that are not yet compared with the digital copies, 760 ERs that have no corresponding electronically-transmitted copies, and 339 identified for revalidation.
The PPCRV's ongoing revalidation activity, Dela Cruz said, have already reconciled 373 ERs that were previously classified for revalidation.
Nine ERs, however, could not be reconciled as they are unreadable either due to printing, quality of paper, or smudges. Two ERs were also found as ERs from the final testing dated May 6.
The PPCRV also found four ERs that do not match their electronically transmitted counterparts. These ERs came from Masbate, Quezon, and Lapu-Lapu City.
The mismatches were mostly by "one to two votes," Dela Cruz said.
"We have already escalated this to the Comelec (Commission on Elections)," the PPCRV said.
Meanwhile, PPCRV Co-IT Director William Yu said they did not find any signs of cheating or manipulation and stressed that most of the ERs found for revalidation "have reasons like encoding errors, smudges which make the ER unreadable."
The PPCRV will move to their original command center at the Pope Pius Center.
The poll watchdog thanked its volunteers who helped them since May 9.
Yu said they were only expecting about 2,000 volunteers to flock the command center in UST but they were able to gather around 10,000 volunteers instead.
The number of physical election returns they have received has already exceeded their 2019 record, which was at 70 percent.