The Commission on Elections (Comelec) has responded to various questions and concerns about the recent conduct of elections, including reports of overvoting and mismatch, and the varying software used in the actual polls.

In a statement, John Rex Laudiangco, Comelec spokesperson, clarified the case of alleged 17 million overvotes.

"The 17 million overvotes seems impossible if the total number of voters is 68 million. Because if it's really true, it will end up like one out of three Filipinos has overvotes for a certain position, which is statistically improbable based on our historical data from 2010 to 2022," Laudiangco said.

He says the 17 million overvotes represents the total number of overvotes on the ballots, and not the number of voters who committed overvoting.

"So, if we divide 17 million by 12, the result is 1.4 million overvotes. And that is within the normal range of 1.5 percent to 2.5 percent, as also recorded in the previous elections," Laudiangco added.

Laudiangco also addressed the complaints that some voters' receipts did not match the list of the candidates they actually voted for, as well as allegations of

The poll body's spokesman said voters who had mismatched voters' receipt were asked to sign a formal complaint so that the electoral board could rescan their receipts after the elections.

Still, Comelec did not clarify if there's really a mismatch after voters' receipts were scanned.

Laudiangco said electoral boards were also trained to tell the voters that they must go to the electoral board if their ballots were already shaded or marked.

Meanwhile, regarding the alleged difference in the software version used pre-election and during the election, Laudiangco said it's basically the same software.

He said the version 3.4 software used for automated counting machines (ACMs), which was included in the Local Source Code Review Report, was the same version that was audited by a third-party auditor.

Only when the software version was passed in the verification process was it renamed to version 3.5.

Comelec's clarification on such election issues, among other supposedly "alarming concerns," came after the Alyansa ng Nagkakaisang Mamamayan (ANIM) and the Church Leaders Council for National Transformation (CLCNT) held a forum on Wednesday, May 22.

Comelec said that if the groups only participated in the pre-election process--like what political parties, other poll watchdogs and media organization did--then they could have been aware of the technicalities and not throw any baseless accusation against the poll body.