Comelec releases site for uncanvassed electoral results

MANILA, Philippines – The public may view the uncanvassed electoral results from the precinct level at the newest public site of the Commission on Elections (Comelec).

During its launch on Sunday, May 8, at the Forum of the Philippine International Convention Center (PICC), Comelec spokesperson James Jimenez said the site pilipinaselectionresults2016.com will show electoral information through 3 different views: transmission received, election returns (ERs) by geography, and certificates of canvass (COC) by geography.

“[It’s an] online site that reflects the electoral results – both the ERs and the COCs which are transmitted to the Central Server. It can be viewed in computers and most mobile phones,” he said.

The poll body official said that results are placed with no ranking, so as to avoid trending.

“Walang total. That was intended as a safeguard against trending kasi syempre kapag hindi naman sabay-sabay ang dating ng mga resulta all of a sudden you’re showing a pronounced trend. That might be a problem so what we have are the raw data only,” Jimenez said.

(There will be no total. That was intended as a safeguard against trending because, of course, results from various areas won’t come in all at the same time, and if you provide a total, all of a sudden you’re showing a pronounced trend. That might be a problem so what we have are the raw data only.)

He added, “It’s deployed in an isolated environment with very high security standard.”

“The site uses state-of-the-art platform or environment and is able to refresh information within a very short time.”

Jimenez said that based on the results found in the website, the public can calculate the numbers available to them and find out who are likely to become the next leaders of the country.

“The ERs contain all the results from the president down to the last candidate. Which means, we can already total them even if we would not announce it… but you could also make your educated guesses,” he said.

He added, “Anyone with a calculator with a lot of time and so minded could actually do that [computation]. That’s precisely the point of this website. It democratizes the count so anyone can [predict the winners].”

Jimenez assured the public that the new site is not susceptible to hacking as they implemented layers of safeguards such user upload restrictions, read-only content, use of Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Services (platform scalability), and scalable bandwidth according to needs, among others.

“These are the safeguards we have put in it so that the website cannot be hacked and we assure you that when you go to this website the results you’ll get are the ones coming from the Comelec,” he said.

Jimenez added that the service provider in the last 3 elections, Smartmatic, also conducted a penetration test on the website.

“At the same time, prior to launch Smartmatic also conducted a penetration test on this website which means they have actually tried to hack their own website to make sure na hindi siya magagawa (it can’t be done),” he said.

In the 2010 polls, the first time the country used the automated election system, the poll body had also launched the website, wherein voting results based on ERs were made public on the same day of the elections despite still being uncanvassed. – FP/Sunnex/Rappler.com

This article is republished under Rappler’s content sharing agreement with the SunStar network in the coverage of the 2016 national and local elections.