Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting

Founded	October 1991
Founder	H.E. Jaime Cardinal Sin, Haydee Yorac, Henrietta T. de Villa, Bishop Gabriel Reyes, Msgr. Bayani Valenzuela
Type	Non-profit NGO
Focus	Elections, plebiscites and referendums
Location	Pope Pius XII Center, United Nations Avenue, Ermita, Manila, Philippines
Area served	Nationwide
Services	Democracy reform in the Philippines
Fields	Poll watching, advocacy, electoral reforms
Key people	Henrietta T. de Villa (Chairperson)
Volunteers	500,000+
Website	http://www.ppcrv.org/

The Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) is a non-profit organization that serves as a watchdog in Philippine elections. Despite being affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church, it considers itself an independent, non-partisan, and non-sectarian organization.

Its headquarters are located at the Pope Pius XII Center, United Nations Avenue, Ermita, Manila, Philippines.

History

The Second Plenary Council of the Philippines, held in February 1991, called for reforms in the conduct of elections in the Philippines. In May 1991, H.E. Jaime Cardinal Sin, Commission on Elections (Philippines) Comelec Commissioner Haydee Yorac, then-Laity President Henrietta T. de Villa, Bishop Gabriel Reyes, Msgr. Bayani Valenzuela, and thirty Parish Lay Leaders conceived of the idea of the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) in Villa San Miguel in Mandaluyong City.

In October 1991, the PPCRV was launched at St. Paul University, Quezon City, with around one thousand laypeople from the parishes of the Archdiocese of Manila. The next month, with the support of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, the PPCRV expanded its operations nationwide.

The first test of PPCRV's poll-watching activities came in the 1992 presidential elections. In its first electoral exercise, 346,688 PPCRV volunteers participated in poll-watching, voters’ assistance, assisting the Board of Election Inspectors, protecting election returns, monitoring electoral exercise, and watching the canvassing of votes.

PPCRV's primary function is to ensure the conduct of clean, honest, accurate, meaningful, and peaceful elections, as stipulated in their CHAMP backronym. However, there are also additional functions, including:

• The advocacy of electoral reforms
• Conducting parallel manual auditing in automated elections
• The coordination of parishes for poll-watching
• Fielding volunteers
• Providing legal assistance related to elections
• Reporting of electoral violations
• Provision of voters' assistance services
• Voters' education

Issues

PPCRV has been accused of being a Commission on Elections (COMELEC) lapdog since the conduct of the 2010 general elections, an allegation that the chairperson of PPCRV, Henrietta T. de Villa, disputes. The organization has been an official watchdog of the Commission of Elections since 2010.

In 2010, it had objected to the National Movement for Free Elections' (NAMFREL) application as a citizen's arm of COMELEC, stating that a dual system would interfere with election watch. However, NAMFREL had never objected to PPCRV's applications as a citizen arm in previous elections. The feud seems to be over as both parties were accredited by Comelec for 2013 midterm elections and agreed on their respective functions.

There was an allegation that the PPCRV was receiving foreign funding for its operations, something that the organization denied.

During the transmission of votes, on the night after the polls for the 2013 midterm elections had closed, the PPCRV server released inaccurate data which was attributed to a formatting error in the server's software. The counting of transmitted results was suspended for an hour while the software, provided by Smartmatic, was fixed.