The instrument, which provides unbiased information about reliability of the official tabulation of votes, has been being used for 30 years worldwide. When it was used the first time in Philippines, the difference between PVT results and official tabulation results was quite big.
The parallel vote tabulation (PVT) was used in Philippines for the first time, in 7 February 1986 early presidential election. Those election campaign had two candidates: then-president-dictator Ferdinand Marcos (1965‑1986) and the only candidate from Philippine opposition, widow of the leader of the resistance against Marcos regime Corazón Aquino. The lack of public confidence in the results of previous election and a suspicion of possible election fraud during the voting process and vote count united a lot of Filipinos, who joined the National Citizens' Movement for Free Elections NAMFREL). In particular, over 500,000 volunteers participated in observation campaign called “Quick Count” on the election day. Thus, on 7 February, non-partisan observers were deployed to all 90,000 polling stations, where they recorded the voting results and promptly sent the data to NAMFREL headquarters. The activists were trying to show the independent tabulation and compare it to the official results in such a way.
Picture is taken at: GNDEM
According to the PVT results, the opposition leader gained in 700,000 more votes than then-president. However, the election commission COMELEC announced that Marcos had won on 15 February, receiving 53.6 % of votes, and Aquino ‑ – 46.1 % (10,807,197 and 9,291,761 votes respectively).
Results of the PVT, conducted by the National Citizens' Movement for Free Elections, which displayed the manipulations on the tabulation stage, had a remarkable influence on future happenings in Philippines ending up with fleeing Marcos and the change of political regime. Thus, the “Quick Count” campaign became the first example of a united civil society working to increase the transparency of national elections through the organization of PVT.
Over the 30 years, 46 different countries conducted 184 PVTs. In Ukraine, Civil Network OPORA has been successfully realizing parallel vote tabulation since 2010. We are one of two organizations in the world today, which dared and successfully organized PVT in local elections (2015 local elections).
According to the PVT methodology, observers watch adherence to electoral procedures at polling stations on the election day, count the voters who put their ballots into ballot boxes (voter turnout), analyze the violations and provide oversight of the vote count.