The Commission on Elections denied allegations the results of the 2022 national and local elections were rigged.
In a statement Thursday night, Comelec chairperson George Erwin Garcia downplayed concerns raised about the transmission of results from a “private and similar IP address” in the areas of Metro Manila, Cavite, and Batangas in last year’s polls.
“There’s no requirement in the law stating that all modems should be different or similar IP addresses,” the poll official said.
Garcia explained there were around 20,300 modems which have the same IP address last year.
The 4G network modems, he said, were purchased for the Comelec-leased vote counting machines as well as to cover the 5,000 damaged modems from VCMs purchased in 2016 that were later refurbished for last year’s polls.
Garcia assured that all these modems underwent necessary tests.
He, however, noted that it would take the Comelec more months if it opted to change all IP addresses of the 20,300 modems.
“There’s no effect or difference in accuracy, legitimacy, and functionality of transmission, whether the modems have similar or different IP addresses,” Garcia said.
The poll body chief also refuted allegations of a “man-in-the-middle” in the transmission of the election results.
Garcia said if this was the case, there should have been inconsistencies in the result.
“There’s no intermediary or man-in-the-middle in the transmission of NLE 2022 results because the results from the polling precincts are accurate with the results transmitted to Comelec servers,” he said.
Both the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPRCV) and the National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL) showed 99.97 percent accuracy between the printed election returns and the electronically-transmitted ones.
Garcia also noted the strongest basis would be the ballots that are under the custody of the city and municipal treasury, alongside its secured scanned images kept by the Comelec.
He said the result of a random manual audit from the said ballots in 748 clustered precincts showed 99.949 percent accuracy.
The Comelec earlier made available for public access the digital and printed copies of the 2022 NLE transmission logs which were uploaded to Comelec’s official website at www.comelec.gov.ph.