Let me turn now to the more serious accusation posed by several quarters that the VOTE SHARE of TEAM PNOY and therefore of the non-Team PNOY candidates was "CONSTANT" throughout the Canvassing stages 1-16 conducted by Comelec.
Rene Azurin in his article mentioned in Part 1 yesterday quotes two "experts":
As first pointed out by political activist Ado Paglinawan, the way the 2013 election results came in was "highly suspicious." He correctly observed that, "from the smallest count to the biggest count, there is consistency in the space between the first 15 senatorial candidates…. The progression through the night is mathematically predictable, and is a statistical improbability." The nationwide trend observed by Mr. Paglinawan in the senatorial tally indicated to him that the count "was following a pre-programmed formula based on earlier pre-paid surveys, rather than the actual vote." It was clear to him, he wrote, "that an earlier decision of ranking had been predetermined and the proportion of votes had been pre-designated from a national perspective, with a total disregard for provincial and regional nuances…. From 10% of the vote to 60%, the tally has been running a consistent vote share. As the votes from different provinces came in, the voting pattern was identical for the senatorial positions, something contrary to historical experience in Philippine politics."
Former Comelec IT director Ernie del Rosario adds: "The progressive tallies follow some sort of deterministic linear equation devoid of the influence of any probabilistic parameter or variable. This can only mean one thing -- it is a pre-designed results reporting mechanism that fits the 9-3 survey instead of a tally of the actual votes. I will call it the 9-3 Formula. Notice that the rankings of the candidates in the entire tally (1st to 33rd place) from the time the first report was published to subsequent ones are practically unchanged. What happened to the individual candidates’ known bailiwicks that should have caused some ranking movements in the tallied results? Smoothened by the 9-3 linear formula?" Mr. del Rosario then wryly remarks, "Magdadaya rin lang ang mga ito, medyo sana lagyan nila ng konting pag-iisip [These guys who planned to cheat should have maybe put a little more thought into it]."
Is it literally true, as Mr. Paglinawan claims that, "
From 10% of the vote to 60%, the tally has been running a consistent vote share" ?
The simple yet rigorously true answer to this question is
NO! as a clear-eyed examination of the raw official tally data below would easily show -- although it would seem that careless or intentionally deceptive GRAPHING and TABULATING of the data has confirmed the bias of many that a "linear equation" determined the results resulting in a CONSTANT share of the vote for Team PNoy throughout the 16 Comelec Canvasses. The table below is from
Rappler's Official Tally Page
POE,
Grace | 6.408=
176 | 6.481=
729 | 6.646=
866 | 6.696=
251 | 6.737=
401 | 6.726=
848 | 6.739=
432 | 6.823=
043 | 6.791=
939 | 6.849=
068 | 6.845=
406 | 6.851=
528 | 6.827=
111 | 6.825=
845 | 6.833=
469 | 6.836=
977 |
| LEGARDA, Loren | 6.289209 | 6.052085 | 5.995208 | 6.054241 | 6.186465 | 6.171682 | 6.186527 | 6.229455 | 6.222154 | 6.285388 | 6.299719 | 6.288226 | 6.268697 | 6.26446 | 6.273427 | 6.272146 |
| CAYETANO, Alan | 5.759226 | 5.632376 | 5.707426 | 5.715334 | 5.768305 | 5.789212 | 5.784509 | 5.837116 | 5.829217 | 5.906367 | 5.911245 | 5.924696 | 5.910071 | 5.905143 | 5.908654 | 5.907545 |
| ESCUDERO, Chiz | 5.787896 | 5.828463 | 5.84136 | 5.802596 | 5.793761 | 5.77217 | 5.741245 | 5.874194 | 5.923798 | 5.902021 | 5.905759 | 5.91766 | 5.890411 | 5.876858 | 5.884117 | 5.881893 |
| ANGARA, Sonny | 5.262514 | 5.329173 | 5.415183 | 5.41643 | 5.399872 | 5.412031 | 5.402278 | 5.376451 | 5.380348 | 5.374626 | 5.385823 | 5.392037 | 5.38607 | 5.379554 | 5.380569 | 5.381709 |
| AQUINO, Bam | 4.889264 | 5.03601 | 4.892162 | 5.085233 | 5.036078 | 5.096358 | 5.075429 | 5.084355 | 5.164426 | 5.165697 | 5.151384 | 5.161811 | 5.201167 | 5.206076 | 5.213128 | 5.222215 |
| PIMENTEL, Koko | 4.956139 | 5.085349 | 5.073804 | 5.026066 | 5.001143 | 4.994109 | 5.009129 | 4.980641 | 4.984305 | 4.928569 | 4.919514 | 4.934624 | 4.932817 | 4.945154 | 4.944408 | 4.949251 |
| TRILLANES, Sonny | 4.755243 | 4.58992 | 4.715206 | 4.722992 | 4.736474 | 4.825775 | 4.798255 | 4.819638 | 4.767335 | 4.726851 | 4.732401 | 4.748471 | 4.731949 | 4.745798 | 4.746317 | 4.749372 |
| VILLAR, Cynthia | 4.621456 | 4.543628 | 4.497219 | 4.544701 | 4.629311 | 4.658743 | 4.668389 | 4.62743 | 4.653344 | 4.694 | 4.675218 | 4.663274 | 4.653185 | 4.645528 | 4.648594 | 4.647743 |
| MAGSAYSAY, Ramon | 3.977589 | 3.951371 | 3.893306 | 3.843258 | 3.785981 | 3.80859 | 3.779222 | 3.728927 | 3.769574 | 3.796315 | 3.798287 | 3.802919 | 3.817896 | 3.813978 | 3.816006 | 3.818451 |
| HONTIVEROS, Risa | 3.491308 | 3.461584 | 3.650998 | 3.625094 | 3.598067 | 3.646786 | 3.596486 | 3.628285 | 3.690129 | 3.669277 | 3.697679 | 3.706785 | 3.68636 | 3.68128 | 3.680035 | 3.678542 |
| MADRIGAL, Jamby | 2.166958 | 2.081498 | 2.080517 | 2.089797 | 2.094864 | 2.153473 | 2.161967 | 2.191846 | 2.245768 | 2.26829 | 2.260171 | 2.2624 | 2.281073 | 2.27589 | 2.281109 | 2.283088 |
| TOTALS | 58.36498 | 58.07319 | 58.40926 | 58.62199 | 58.76772 | 59.05578 | 58.94287 | 59.20138 | 59.42234 | 59.56647 | 59.58261 | 59.65443 | 59.58681 | 59.56556 | 59.60983 | 59.62893 |
It is the TOTALS line in the table above that the critics say was rigged to give TeamPNoy a 60% share of the vote at the end. They claim that the share of Team Pnoy was "consistent" or "constant throughout the sixteen stages of canvas, a claim that gained traction, in my opinion only because the data DOES LOOK CONSTANT if you graph it a certain way or tabulate it as follows with the SIGNIFICANT FIGURES of the summation process truncated and the actual numbers rounded to the nearest tenth of a percent.
Graphed at low resolution or in a range of 0 to 100%, this data would look like this:
But compare the above to the same data plotted to see the variations in it:
.
NUMERICAL ANALYSIS OF THE VOTE SHARE DATA
What we are dealing with here is a set of 16 percentages representing the SUM of the votes gained by the 12 candidates running under Team PNoy divided by the running total of the votes tallied at each Canvass Stage multiplied by 100.
Whenever we are dealing with a set of numbers and someone says they look to be approximately the same, we can quantify exactly what is meant by the term "approximately" or "almost the same."
The first step is to calculate the MEAN or AVERAGE VALUE of the set which in this case happens to be
59.12838388 %
The next step is to calculate the STANDARD DEVIATION of the set, a quantity that measures the spread of the data around the mean. In this case the standard deviation happens to be
0.534782704 %
Such a Mean and Standard Deviation cannot in any way be regarded as the hallmarks of a "constant" set of numbers. To compare the spread in the vote share data with that of a standard Social Weather Stations survey of 1200 respondents, we note that the corresponding number in SWS is called the statistical error or margin of error but it is in the vicinity of 3.0 percent. In other words SWS raw statistics have an uncertainty or builty in IMPRECISION equal to plus or minus 3 percent, which must be borne in mind whenever one reads the results of those surveys.
But I shall deal with the accusation that the Senate Vote was patterned after SWS surveys in a subsequent post.
For now, the simple answer to the question of whether or not the Team PNoy share was constant is:
