A year after 2022 polls, PPCRV reiterates rigging claims unsubstantiated

Reports a 10-page letter dated 29 August 2023 from the board of trustees of the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting, the largest accredited citizens' arm of COMELEC, to its coordinators and volunteers, seven pages of which address theories of rigging raised by a group of IT specialists led by former ICT secretary Eliseo Rio. PPCRV addresses three claims about the 2022 vote — the recurrence of a single private IP address, the surge of election returns in the first two hours after polls closed, and a man-in-the-middle attack — explaining that Network Address Translation is a legitimate technique that the carriers Globe and Smart have confirmed using to connect the vote-counting machines, and that its own log-timing analysis matched vote-counting machine timestamps against the transparency server, showing that printing and transmitting returns can be done in under 30 minutes. It states that its parallel count, matching electronically transmitted election returns against the copies printed by the machines, produced a 99.84% accuracy rate, and that the random manual audit led by the Legal Network for Truthful Elections found 99% accuracy. The article also records that Marcos, with 31 million votes, became “the first majority president since 1986”.