Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, November 14) — The Commission on Elections (Comelec) on Tuesday denied that there were discrepancies in the transmission of election results in the May 2022 elections.
Comelec made the statement after the former secretary of the Department of Information and Communications Technology, Eliseo Rio Jr., alleged that “thousands of ERs (election returns) were already transmitted by the VCMs (vote counting machines) BEFORE these were being printed.”
He said since it was impossible for the actual VCMs to transmit before 8 p.m., \”then all those thousands of VCMs that transmitted BEFORE 7pm were clones of the actual VCMs that printed the ERs AFTER 7pm that PPCRV counted,” said Rio in a statement on Tuesday, citing the telco logs posted in Comelec’ s website on Sept. 8.
But the poll body said the telco logs from Globe and Smart have nothing to do with the transmission of ERs.
Comelec explained that the Globe telco log only “reflected and recorded” the connection of Municipal Board of Canvassers’ Consolidated Canvassing System (CCS) to the National Board of Canvassers-CCS at 1 p.m. of May 9, 2022.
Meanwhile, the volume of traffic in the Smart telco log “refers not to election data, but rather to network data needed to monitor the status of SD-WAN (software-defined wide area network) device.”
Furthermore, Comelec said that transmission of ERs before 7 p.m. is impossible due to a firewall in the system.
“This plainly indicates that the telco logs do not show any connected foreign device or illegal device,” the commission added.
“A firewall renders impossible any transmission before 7:00 p.m. because the same restricts and validates the authenticity of the ER transmission, which can only be done after the closing of polls,” it added.
