PLDT, Smart Power PPCRV Command Center for Transparent 2025 Elections

PLDT and Smart, together with the group’s corporate arm, PLDT Enterprise, host the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) Command Center at their facility in Sampaloc, Manila, for the 2025 National and Local Elections.

“PLDT and Smart’s alliance with the PPCRV is built on a shared and unwavering commitment to safeguarding the integrity of Philippine elections. Equipped with servers, network infrastructure, internet connectivity, mobile devices, and other communication tools, the Command Center enables PPCRV to coordinate the work of over 450,000 volunteers across the country,” said Blums Pineda, SVP and Head of Enterprise Business Group at PLDT and Smart.

The site serves as the nerve center of PPCRV’s election operations, enabling the civic society organization to gather data in real-time and process transmission audits as part of its advocacy for a Clean, Honest, Accurate, Meaningful, Peaceful (CHAMP) polls. The facility also boosts the poll watchdog’s unofficial parallel count.

Accredited by the COMELEC, PPCRV volunteers will collect the physical copies of pre-transmission election returns (ERs) from automated counting machines across the country. These documents are then forwarded to the Command Center and compared with the digital ERs transmitted through the Automated Election System to ensure consistency. And with advances in digital technology, PPCRV’s parallel count will now include local races, enhancing transparency across all levels.

PLDT and Smart’s partnership with the PPCRV started in 1992, just a year after the organization was founded. In the past 33 years, the collaboration witnessed important milestones in the country’s electoral process, such as the 2010 polls when Filipinos cast their votes using automated counting machines for the first time. Since then, the PLDT Group has supported the election watchdog’s efforts to monitor and audit the elections and has expanded to include broader logistical and technical support, and initiatives to engage youth volunteers.

The PLDT Group, through its corporate arm PLDT Enterprise and data center arm VITRO, Inc., has signed a partnership with the Commission on Elections (COMELEC) in support of more transparent and secure midterm elections. VITRO data centers house two of the three critical server clusters that will receive data directly transmitted by automated counting machines in the upcoming polls.

As the country’s leading integrated telco network, PLDT and Smart’s resilient infrastructure provides the backbone for the secure transmission of election data from voting precincts across the Philippine archipelago to data centers in the nation’s capital. COMELEC has secured SIMs from the three major Philippine telcos that will be used as primary and backup for the transmission of election results. The majority of these are Smart SIMs. The election body has tapped the iOne-Ardent joint venture to provide the secure electronic transmission services for the 2025 polls.

PLDT and Smart’s efforts to collaborate with the government by providing technology that strengthens democracy highlight their commitment to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG 16 on strong institutions.