Duplication.
This was what the Commission on Elections (COMELEC) said that caused the startling reduction of over five million votes in the live election results just hours after polls closed.
According to COMELEC Chairman George Erwin Garcia, the sudden drop stemmed from unfiltered duplicate transmissions in the partial and unofficial tally.
“The [partial and unofficial] count had an excess of five million because of this—because the [entities and parties] did not have a program that would filter the duplicate [entries] as a result of processing,” Garcia explained during a press conference on May 13.
The issue first surfaced just after midnight. Observers monitoring the COMELEC transparency server noticed that the vote count, which had been steadily increasing, suddenly dropped by several million.
Given the late hour and the lack of immediate explanation, the incident triggered alarm and widespread speculation online, with netizens and concerned citizens probing if it was a glitch in the system, a transmission error, or something else entirely.
The Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV), a non-partisan watchdog that receives parallel data from COMELEC’s transparency server, also flagged the inconsistency. According to PPCRV Senior Trustee and Spokesperson Ana de Villa-Singson, the discrepancy became clear during their internal checks.
“Our total was different from everything coming out in the media. In fact, we hesitated and decided not to show our numbers because we couldn’t explain the difference yet.
“It turns out that from the very beginning, our data was different—and in hindsight, that difference was exactly the double count,” de Villa-Singson said.
She added that the PPCRV had been corroborating data with COMELEC’s media partners and became aware that transmission rates were being reported as 66% by 8:30 p.m. on the night of the elections. However, PPCRV did not have access to the same back-end data, and its figures did not match the ones publicly displayed.
COMELEC maintained that no official results were affected, and that the discrepancy only appeared in the partial and unofficial figures displayed to the public. The commission also attributed it to how the new vote-counting machines, Miru Systems, handled duplicate transmissions.
Still, the incident has raised serious concerns. Election overseers now call for access to full transmission logs and system audit trails. While COMELEC insists the problem was technical, the five-million-vote discrepancy has reinforced public demands for greater transparency, clearer communication, and stronger safeguards in the country’s automated election system.
