Is 68:32 really magic?
Was there really cheating involved? (Photo: Reuters)
Less than 2 hours after voting had officially closed on election day, May 9th, COMELEC started to release results via their transparency server. The numbers came in by the millions. By 6:17am the following morning, 95% of the election returns had already been transmitted, making the 2022 election count process the fastest in COMELEC’s history.
COMELEC Commissioner George Garcia says the record breaking speed is “because of the improved and upgraded equipment and system.”
At the time of making this statement, hundreds of voters were stuck in precincts, unable to cast their votes because of faulty and malfunctioning VCMs. Some voters reported that they waited in line for 16 hours or more for a variety of reasons: waiting for SD cards, paper jams, lack of signal, and many more. There were a total of 1,800 reported cases of VCM malfunctions.
Despite all of the malfunctions, rampant reports of vote buying from all around the country, and viral videos of ballots being torn up, the numbers continued to pour in. As the gap between the two leading candidates got wider and wider, anxiety started to settle within the voters.
The numbers were coming in at record speed while so many precincts were having VCM malfunctions, leaving thousands of voters unable to send their votes in—it just wasn’t making sense to the people waiting at home. So some Twitter users took it upon themselves to make their own calculations.
Discrepancies?
Most opinions on the alleged discrepancies were posted on Twitter, and then cross-posted to other platforms like Facebook and Instagram. The tweets were receiving 50,000 likes and supported by other experts in the field weighing in on the topic, and people wondered whether the numbers had already been programmed to begin with, calling it the 68:32 magic.
But the claim has since been denied by COMELEC themselves, as well as poll watchdog PPCRV, who conducted the manual encoding of election returns. Additionally, experts such as that from the UP School of Statistics have said that the 68:32 ratio is not evidence of fraud. Some have explained that the phenomena can be attributed to the Law of Large numbers, and not to a large-scale cheating conspiracy.
Despite being disputed by some experts, many still believe that the irregularity is statistically improbable. Whether it’s true or not, COMELEC still has other issues they need to resolve. Malfunctioning machines, missing SD cards, lack of signal– they’ve deprived thousands of Filipinos of their right to vote, and they should be held responsible.
