Hours after the closing of voting precincts in cities and municipalities in the country on Monday, 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), where the Comelec headquarters for the May 9 polls is located, Comelec spokesperson James Jimenez said the site will show electoral information through three different views: transmission received, Election Returns (ERs) by geography, and Certificates of Canvass (COC) by geography.
The poll body official said that the results are placed with no ranking, so as to avoid trending.
“Walang total, that is 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.
He added, “It?s deployed in an isolated environment with very high security. It 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 on 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.
With this, Jimenez assured that the new site is not vulnerable to hacking as they implemented layers of safeguards such as user-upload restrictions, read-only content; use of Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Services (platform scalability), scalable bandwidth according to needs, among others.
“These are the safeguard 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 three elections, Smartmatic, also conducted penetration test on the website.
In the 2010 elections when the country used the automated election system for the first time, the poll body also launched a website where voting results based on ERs can be viewed on the same day of the elections despite still being uncanvassed. — PNA
