Despite the recent leak of the personal information of some 57-million Filipino registered voters, the Commission on Elections has put up a website that will show the un-canvassed results of electronic voting nationwide
In a press conference, Comelec spokesman James Jimenez said the website will allow the public to calculate the results of today’s elections for themselves.
“The election returns contain all the results from the president down to the last candidate. Which means, we can already total them even if we don’t announce it. But you could also make your educated guesses,” Jimenez said in a press briefing at the elections headquarters at the Philippine International Convention Center.
The site, www.pilipinaselectionresults2016.com, will be made available right after voting closes.
“Anyone with a calculator, time and is so minded could actually do [the computation]. That’s precisely the point of this website. It democratizes the count so anyone can [do it],” Jimenez said.
During the first automated elections in 2010, the Comelec also put up a website where voting based on election returns was made public on the same day of the elections.
In the present website, the precinct results and canvassing results for all 17,000 positions contested will be made available to the public.
The public will be able to see the results through the transmissions received, election results by geography and Certificates of Canvass by geography.
However, the website will not provide an overall total number of votes as well as the ranking of the candidates.
“There will be totals for the votes received for that particular precinct only but not for the whole thing,” Jimenez noted.
“This was intended as a safeguard against trending because the results will not be arriving simultaneously, then, 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 said.
Jimenez also said stressed that the results sourced from the website cannot be used as basis for the proclamation of winners, as they will still have to be canvassed by the appropriate Boards of Canvassers (BoCs).
As to its security, Jimenez said several steps have been adopted to ensure that it is safe from hacking.
These include automatic back-up execution, use of Amazon Elastic Cloud Services, strong password policies, multi-factor authentication, a third-party security provider, scalable bandwidth and the passing of penetration tests.
“It’s deployed in an isolated environment with very high security,” Jimenez said.