Around 5 million in vote discrepancy caught just in time

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Now corrected, initial quick counts based on Comelec files reflected duplicated votes from 15,000 precincts so far

MANILA, Philippines – Voters who stayed up waiting for election results may have prematurely felt exhilarated or upset by the rankings and vote margins they were seeing in media’s live results pages.  

Rappler and other media teams discovered past midnight Tuesday, May 13, that transmissions from thousands of precincts across the country were duplicated during consolidation in the central server of the Commission on Elections, corresponding to roughly 5 million votes. 

Undetected, the files with duplicated precinct counts were shared with the five transparency servers where the media, poll watchdogs, and political parties accessed the results they were sharing to the public. 

After the media outlets’ tech teams stationed in the server center raised the issue, the Comelec IT said they had released new files which addressed the duplicates at around 2 am. 

Rappler is still investigating the issue, but the adjustments provided by Comelec are already reflected in the counts on the Rappler Election Results site. 

Reelectionist Senator Bong Go lost the most number of votes in the adjustments — around 5.2 million — but he remains the frontrunner. The votes for other senatorial candidates were also adjusted by the millions, but the Magic 12 remains. Only the rankings of Rodante Marcoleta and Ping Lacson were interchanged. 

Affected rankings, margins  

Based on Rappler’s review of the files from Comelec as of 11:44 pm, the following were affected: 

• 15,001 precincts 
• Votes of 39,280 candidates
• Over 1,400 single winner positions affected 
• Ranking for around 7,600 candidates

We will be updating this story with more details as we investigate the files further. 

Confusing file structures 

Assisted by advanced satellite technologies, the transmission of votes for the 2025 midterm elections was expected to be a very speedy process. The Comelec even predicted that it would be over within three hours.

Instead, hours into the process, media groups accredited to participate in the unofficial quick count continued to grapple with confusing file structures and duplicate entries. 

The chaos resulted in inaccuracies in the tabulation of results both at the national and local levels.  

The Comelec’s various data centers were supposed to start receiving election results (ER) from over 93,000 precincts all over the country at 7:00 pm on Monday, May 12. 

While the Comelec’s election website did show that ERs were being received within the hour, workstations at the transmission room, where media groups were supposed to receive copies of the results files initially failed. 

Files were eventually sent to the workstations but transparency server end users found that the hash files, which were supposed to validate the completeness and authenticity of the files, were not matching. 

At various points, the files that were being received were blanks. 

The Comelec’s IT division eventually announced that none of the hashes would really match because the servers that were receiving the files were not synching properly. 

When the newsrooms were finally allowed to transmit, new problems emerged: files were malformed and were not in formats expected by the end users. This resulted in confusion on how to interpret them. – Rappler.com