Why you should doubt the Maguindanao election results

(UPDATED) As always, the devil is in the numbers.

More than six weeks after the May 14 elections, the controversy surrounding the Maguindanao elections has yet to be resolved. It all started with the supposed 12-0 shutout win of administration candidates in the province. This was followed by news of provincial elections supervisor Lintang Bedol saying that municipal certificates of canvass (MCoCs) were stolen, only to backtrack later by saying they were simply missing. Bedol himself went “missing” twice despite repeated summons from the Commission on Elections (Comelec).

Following the news of allegations of massive cheating in the province, the poll body ordered a recanvass of the results. The special body created to conduct the canvass had to resort to the second and fourth copies of MCoCs. The recanvassing of votes cast in the 22 towns resulted into a total of 195,823 votes for Team Unity candidate Juan Miguel Zubiri, and 67,111 for Genuine Opposition bet Aquilino Pimentel III.

While Pimentel remains ahead of the race, the latest tally today shows that Pimentel now only has a slim lead of 2,700. He earlier had a lead of 4,293; prior to the canvass, Pimentel was leading by 111,000. The results from Basilan, Zamboanga del Sur, Lanao del Sur, and towns Binan, Laguna and Bogo, Cebu will determine the 12th winning senator.

In Maguindanao, a look at the election results there reveals highly improbable figures and surprisingly high voter turnout.

Comparing the results from the “original” provincial certificate of canvass — which was set aside by the national board of canvassers — with the new set of documents shows unusual decreases and increases in the votes for certain senatorial candidates (see table).

For example, the first set recorded a total of 194,028 for TU candidate Michael Defensor. After the second round of canvassing, his votes were reduced by as much as 25,123. Detained rebel leader Antonio Trillanes IV, who first got a “zero” vote suddenly got 2,147 votes. All the other “zero” votes remained unchanged in the final tally. The Supreme Court in 1966 declared a “zero” vote as statistically improbable.

Meanwhile, Pimentel’s votes increased by 54 from the first provincial CoC while that of Zubiri’s remained at 195,823. Comelec explained this large discrepancies by saying that election officers might have gotten it wrong the first time.

The table above also shows extremely high vote-percentage shares for TU candidates — Zubiri (98.42 percent), Edgardo Angara (98 percent), Luis Singson (97.63 percent), Prospero Pichay (97.50 percent), Joker Arroyo (97 percent), and Ralph Recto (95.83 percent).

Another suspicious pattern in the Maguindanao results is the unusually high voter turnout in all the towns, averaging at 96 percent. Shariff Aguak (99.29), Datu Piang (99.28 percent), Mangundadatu (99.12), and Talayan (99.06 percent) registered the highest turnouts.

Note: The figures and percentages have been updated following additional data from the Comelec

Moreover, in the old PCoC, Singson had the highest number of votes. But in the new tally, Zubiri emerged number one. “The first was unbelievable, the second simply magic,” Pimentel’s lawyers said.

In 2004, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo had the same statistically improbable number of votes obtained in Maguindanao. In at least two towns, Arroyo’s votes even equaled the number of actual voters, 9,321 in Ampatuan and 17,250 in Datu Piang. In both towns, as in many places in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), the opposition’s highly popular candidate, Fernando Poe Jr., failed to garner a single vote.

Pimentel has his hopes pinned on the high tribunal, which had given him 10 days to file his motion for reconsideration after it denied his petition to stop the Maguindanao recanvassing. The Supreme Court ruled that the Pimentel failed to prove that votes counted by the Comelec were “spurious.”

“Members of the opposition earlier protested the inclusion of the results in Maguindanao in the overall count following fraud allegations. Zubiri meanwhile wanted the votes in the province included, saying that not doing so would disenfranchise its voters. (See related posts here and here.)