Comelec to proclaim winning senators by May 18, party-lists by May 19

MANILA, Philippines, May 16 ------ The Commission on Elections said it hopes to proclaim the 12 winning senators by May 18, and the leading party-lists with guaranteed seats by May 19.

In a Viber message to the media, COMELEC Commissioner George Gracia said they will be able to do this if the COCs from Hong Kong arrive on May 16. However, it is uncertain when the COCs from China will arrive in Manila as parts of China are currently in lockdown due to a COVID-19 surge.

The COMELEC said the National Board of Canvassers (NBOC) has already canvassed a total of 159 certificates of canvass (COCs). There were 10 COCs which were added from the 149 on May 14. The 10 COCs were from the 9 overseas absentee voting in India, Laos, Pakistan, Hungary, Poland, Chile and Amman, Jordan, Syria and South Africa, while the other COC included in the tally today was from the Persons Deprived of Liberty (PDLs). The remaining 14 COCs will be coming from the 11 manual overseas voting, 2 electronic COCs from Hong Kong/China and Lanao del Sur and 1 manual COCs for the 63 barangays. There are 173 total COCs.

Meanwhile, the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) said encoded and matched physical election returns with transmitted results yielded a 98.42 percent match rate, based on the figures released by May 15 afternoon. The 98.42 percent match rate only includes those encoded and matched election returns, which is 37 percent of the total ERs or 39,882. The high match rate means the tandem of Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. and Sara Duterte-Carpio is leading in the manual audit as well. The 1.58 percent mismatch was due to 34 ERs that have yet to be matched. Another 297 could not be matched because the digital equivalent were no longer transmitted by the Commission of Elections' transparency server and 308 will undergo verification. The poll watchdog said it has yet to encode and match more than half of the total ERs to get the final picture whether the manual audit matches the results from the transparency server.

PPCRV estimates that manual audit will take until May 20. There are no election returns yet from overseas. PPCRV also scaled down its operations to 12 hours a day from 24 hours last week. Walk-in volunteers are still welcome to join the manual audit. They are given two to three hours to work as encoder, or runner, or verifier of the election returns.

Source: news.abs-cbn.com