The Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) is yet to confirm if there really is "dagdag-bawas" (literally the act of adding-subtracting) or any similar irregularities in the presentation of the total number of votes in the mid-term polls amid reports of discrepancies in figures from the Commission on Elections (Comelec). 

But so far, election results that PPCRV received from Comelec indicated the same winning candidates--as well as their respective rankings--when compared to the official tallies.

PPCRV Spokesperson Ana de Villa-Singson said Tuesday, May 13, that the watchdog already had access to 98 percent of the total election returns (ERs), the same amount that Comelec has.

Initially, Singson expressed concern about the "significant" gap on the ERs that PPCRV had access to when compared to Comelec. She said PPCRV only had access to 79.9 percent of total ERs, while Comelec was already showing to the public 98.75 percent of ERs.

"I think the most important thing is we have now eyes in the data, and that is all that we ever asked for. Because that is what we owe all of you, the transparency to see the entire count," she said in a press conference.

It had been noted that there were duplicated precinct counts that were shared to the media, poll watchdogs, and political parties through Comelec's transparency server.

But it was not clear if the duplicates were also reflected on the results that were shared by Comelec to the public.

PPCRV has not raised any "dagdag-bawas" possibility.

Should there be any allegation of it, then the ongoing random manual audit (RMA) and the parallel counts will confirm if there is any.

"To your question, is it dagdag-bawas? We'll find out in the RMA and we hope not," Singson said.

Since there were also complaints of overvoting and vote mismatch, Singson believed these might have been caused by the oversensitivity of the automated counting machines (ACMs) via the lower shading threshold.

"It's also we were theorizing baka (maybe) because the machine is so sensitive now, binabaan ngayon threshold to 15 percent, baka masyadong sensitive na ngayon yung makina na kahit konting marka binibilang na (that because the shading threshold was lowered, the machine became sensitive and even small smudges or marks were being counted as votes)," she said.