Election watchdog Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) will conduct a three-part lecture series that will tackle the different aspects of technology in Philippine elections.

The webinar, titled “It’s Good to Know,” will run for three consecutive Saturdays, beginning June 26.

For its first installment, the election watchdog invited Henry Aguda, PPCRV trustee and chief technology officer at UnionBank, to discuss vote-counting machines (VCMs).

VCMs are where voters insert their ballots for electronic tallying.

Hundreds of faulty VCMs marred the conduct of the 2019 midterm elections, but a random manual audit yielded a 99.9953% accuracy rate, the highest since the Philippines began holding automated polls in 2010.

For the 2022 elections, Smartmatic will remain the Comelec’s technology provider after already securing P1.04 billion ($20.8 million) worth of deals.

The PPCRV will also discuss the topics below on the following dates:

• July 3 : How does transmission of votes happen?
• July 10 : How does PPCRV do parallel counting?

The lecture series is among the voter education initiatives for the 2022 polls lined up by the PPCRV, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization “that works and strives for clean, honest, accurate, meaningful, and peaceful elections.” — Rappler.com