PPCRV volunteers led by Fr. Felix Warli Salise performed a dry run of the parallel count system for Bohol local election results on May 7, 2016 at the CAD Laboratory at the Holy Name University in Dampas, Tagbilaran City. The parallel count system is developed and maintained by volunteer developers and trainees from Auza.Net.
There were more than 30 volunteers who showed up for the dry run and the organizers are expecting more volunteers help ensure the sanctity of the electoral process. On May 9, the volunteers are expected to start to encode the results from the printed election returns from each precinct all over the province of Bohol. They may need to work for about a week or until the last available election return is retrieved.
The system was developed during the 2013 elections by volunteer developers and was updated to accommodate the changes required for the 2016 elections. Auza.Net technology consultant Jerome Auza hopes to be able to have access to the per precinct data from the transparency server provided by COMELEC on May 9 onward. This is in order to to have a closed loop comparison between the printed election returns and the transmitted data to COMELEC. This way, PPCRV will be able to conclude that the data transmitted are exactly the same as that on the election returns.
The PPCRV helps to prevent election fraud by making sure that the tally at the municipal, district, provincial and national levels match with what is reported by COMELEC.
However, this process cannot detect fraud if the results are pre-programmed on the vote counting machines. To detect this kind of fraud, the random manual count audit is performed. In order for the audit to be effective, the precincts to be selected for audit must be selected using a process that can be observed by PPCRV, NAMFREL and the representatives of the political parties. The selection should also be done after the election returns are transmitted to COMELEC so that there is no more opportunity to change the results.