THE PARISH Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) said it found no irregularities in the partial and unofficial results of the 2022 elections, after netizens took notice of a consistent trend they called the “68:32 magic.”
“Our take is that the statistical analysis of the data does not indicate any irregularities,” the PPCRV said in a statement.
“The relatively consistent distribution of votes may be expected to closely mirror the national vote given the random pattern of receipt of the transmitted result,” it continued.
The “68:32 magic” originated in netizens’ analyses of the partial and unofficial results, which circulated online after vote-counting machines transmitted electronic returns on the evening of the May 9 election day.
According to the netizens’ analyses, there was a questionable linear trend between presidential candidates Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. and Vice President Maria Leonor “Leni” Robredo in unofficial results, where Marcos consistently had a consistent 68-percent share of the votes while Robredo had 32 percent.
However, a group of statisticians from the Ateneo de Manila University tapped by the PPCRV to analyze the ratio for irregularities said that “it is not unusual to see these two ratios be similar for each transmission arrival.”
“All statistical tests carried out indicated that the distribution for each transmission arrival is equal in distribution to the total/general distribution. Since the distributions for each transmission arrival are similar to the total/general distribution, the overall ratio being consistent per transmission is not unexpected,” the group explained.
“In fact, given that the transmission arrivals can be considered as random samples of the total vote, the computed ratios for each transmission arrival being similar is quite expected,” they added.
PPCRV chair Myla Villanueva also urged people to give PPCRV volunteers and the Comelec time to analyze election results.
“Hinay hinay lang kasi importante rin na walang magduda sa ating demokrasya. So, please be careful, there’s so much fake news going around,” the poll watchdog chair said.
The Comelec transmission of the election returns (ERs) is being manually audited and verified by the PPCRV to check if the transmitted numbers matched the numbers indicated in the physical copies of the ERs.
ERs are like receipts that show the total number of votes per clustered precinct. A total of 98.35 percent of the ERs have been transmitted, or 106,007 out of 107,785 clustered precincts.
On Thursday night, the PPCRV said that so far, the match rate between their audit and the Comelec’s transmission was 100 percent. Jamilah Mae B. Angco
