Election watchdog Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) has found no discrepancies in their parallel count of the national election returns (ERs).

PPCRV chairperson Myla Villanueva disputed allegations of a “fixed gap” between presidential front-runner Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. and his closest opponent Vice President Leni Robredo, citing that  98.31 percent of the 107,785 total number clustered precincts have been counted without any discrepancies reported as of Wednesday night.

Marcos is currently leading by a margin of over 16 million votes, more than double the tally of Robredo.

Villanueva added that this year’s national elections is the “most modern” automated election in the world.

“Imagine that, 106,000 precincts, one person, one vote. When you feed that ballot into the machine, it’s consolidated and right away sent to what we call canvassing systems that add up your votes and show up on the boards,” she said in a forum at the PPCRV Command Center inside the University of Santo Tomas campus.

In the same forum, PPCRV Co-Information Technology Director William Yu said the group’s responsibility is to monitor and verify the election returns, reporting any mismatches to the Commission on Elections (COMELEC).

Yu said this mandate allows them to do the unofficial parallel count but they are not obliged to finish every single precinct.

“But we will encode as long as the ERs arrive and as long as you volunteers continue to show up. Maybe next week we’ll transfer to a smaller venue but we do continue encoding the ERs. We don’t stop until it’s done,” Yu told the PPCRV volunteers.

In the 2019 midterm elections, Yu recalled that only three mismatches were seen out of the 67 percent encoded precincts.

“The three mismatches were endorsed to the Comelec. Overall match rate was 99.995 percent, so very high match rate. We expect the match rates to be high because if there was no tampering along the way, there should be no difference at all in the encoding. That’s the whole point of the activity and this is the reason why your activity today is very, very important,” he said.

“This is a verification activity […] We are supposed to validate the ERs and every time there is a mismatch, we will flag it,” he added.