Gabriela seeks manual recount, probe into vote discrepancies

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MANILA, Philippines — Gabriela Women’s Party submitted a formal letter to the Commission on Elections (Comelec) on Friday, May 16, requesting a thorough investigation into election-related anomalies and a manual vote count. 

The party-list, which has secured a seat in every election since 2004, is now at risk of losing representation in the 2025 midterm elections.

According to the Comelec's official tally, Gabriela ranked 55th in the party-list race, securing just 0.61% of the vote, or 256,811 votes.

Philstar.com estimates show that only the top 53 or 54 party-lists are expected to clinch at least one seat, with 47 to 48 likely to be allotted just one.

This places Gabriela just outside the projected cutoff for securing a seat in the 20th Congress.

Vote discrepancies?

The party-list was also among the groups affected by a drop in votes reflected in the transparency server around 2 a.m., after reports of vote duplication surfaced.

Comelec attributed the vote discrepancies across servers at the time to differences in the speed of election data transmission. 

It also claimed that the apparent “duplication” stemmed from the media’s failure to properly filter or clean data packages transmitted to their servers. 

However, election watchdog Kontra Daya said this explanation can be misleading. 

RELATED: Comelec: No delay, discrepancies in transmission of poll results | Comelec must explain delays and duplicate data, says Kontra Daya

Gabriela believes this issue warrants investigation, emphasizing that reports of undervoting and overvoting must also be taken seriously as they “significantly impact the overall party-list election results.”

“If votes for a sectoral party representing women and other vulnerable sectors can simply vanish without explanation, it risks disenfranchising not only the candidates but the countless women and marginalized communities whose voices they seek to represent,” the letter read.

Over and undervotes

The National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL), an accredited poll watchdog, recorded over 3.31 million overvotes for party-lists. 

This means millions of ballots either reflected more than one party-list choice, invalidating the vote, or were flagged due to stray marks or errors in the automated counting machines.

Gabriela said this disenfranchises millions of voters, "distorting the genuine representation that marginalized sectors such as women rightfully deserve.”

NAMFREL also counted around 18.1 million undervotes for members of the House of Representatives, including nearly 12 million for party-lists alone — indicating that a large number of voters skipped selecting a party-list group altogether or that their selections were not recorded due to machine errors.

Full transparency urged

Only 63 out of the 316 seats in the House of Representatives are allocated to party-lists, in line with the 20% representation rule.

With three to four party-lists likely to receive the maximum three seats, and another two to three expected to get two, Gabriela’s chances of securing a seat remain slim. 

Still, the group said it will continue to push for full transparency, accountability and integrity in the electoral process.

“We will not allow the voices of women, especially those from the margins of society, to be erased — whether by technical glitches, systemic flaws, or even redtagging. The fight for genuine democracy and representation must persist,” Rep. Arlene Brosas (Gabriela Women’s Party) said in a statement.