MANILA, Philippines — The Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) on Tuesday said it delayed the release of its election data reports due to technical issues and inconsistencies between its internal count and publicly reported figures from other transparency server recipients.

In its report, the poll watchdog said it received initial data past 8:15 p.m. on election night in “different file formats,” which caused delays in processing the information.

“Later, we noticed discrepancies between our internal count and publicly reported figures by other transparency server receiving parties. Out of an abundance of caution and our commitment to accuracy, we held off publishing the results while we verified the data,” PPCRV said.

After checking the data, the group said it found its dataset to be accurate, noting that the differences were due to the proper filtering of duplicate entries.

PPCRV also raised concerns over a data gap between what it received and what was being shown on the Commission on Elections’ public access site.

“While COMELEC’s dashboard shows around 98.75 percent transmission, the results file PPCRV received only accounts for 79.9 percent of election returns. We are in active coordination with COMELEC to understand and resolve this gap. We are confident that the commission will send this data as soon as possible,” it said.

The group said the issue highlights the importance of audit processes like the Random Manual Audit (RMA) and the Unofficial Parallel Count (UPC).

“The RMA aims to dispel potential issues with overvoting or unintentional voting as reported quite frequently during election day. The UPC, in turn, will compare the physical election returns with the transmitted returns. So even if the transmitted returns are late, they can be compared for accuracy. So the work of auditing starts today,” the group said.