The Commission on Elections (Comelec) announced Tuesday, May 24, that a total of 163 ballot boxes have already undergone random manual audit (RMA) by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) and civil society organizations and the result yielded a match rate of 99.9 percent with the automated election returns (ERs).

Comelec acting spokesperson Director John Rex Laudiangco said the audited ballot boxes were part of the 737 out of 757 ballot boxes received at the Diamond Hotel in Manila where the RMA is currently being held.

“The match rate remains at 99.9 percent. That’s how high the accuracy rate is,” he said in a press briefing.

Meanwhile, poll watchdog Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) have also received 93,347 election returns (ERs) where a total of 78,894 ERs were already encoded.

Out of the encoded ERs, 77,786 resulted in a 100 percent match rate and 349 were subjected for revalidation due to mismatch.

“The PPCRV has received 88.83 percent . In 2019, by way of comparison, the PPCRV stopped encoding at 70 percent receipt of ERs. Now, they are at 83 percent and they are still going,” Laudiangco said.

“The processes of the PPCRV and the RMA are very good and we hope this would further validate the accuracy and credibility of this elections,” he added.

The random manual audit of votes is being conducted to verify the accuracy of the electronic count of the vote counting machines (VCMs) to the manually audited ballot boxes.

Meanwhile, the PPCRV is also physically validating election returns to ensure that there will be no transmission fraud particularly “dagdag-bawas” or vote-shaving.