Experts are convinced that rigging occured in the recent elections in favor of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. This was done through programming the vote-counting machines for automatic vote-shaving and vote-padding.

These information technology (IT) experts include former Comelec commissioner and NAMFREL official Gus Lagman, previous secretary of the Department of Information and Technology Eliseo Rio and former bank official Franklin Ysaac. They pointed out that IT experts were not present when the SD cards were inserted into the VCMs. Contrary to election rules, these cards were not assigned digital signatures. Therefore, there is no assurance as to the integrity of the SD inserted into the machines, whether these contain the same program examined by experts. There was a long period in between the two where the cards could have been replaced or reprogrammed to reflect out the pattern where the votes for Marcos Jr at Leni Robredo were consistently at 68-32 percentages.

On election day, it would even be probable that the actual votes were not counted at all, they said. There was no way of checking that the votes coming from the VCMs were correct.

They also questioned the rapid transmission of the votes to Comelec servers and the dumping of results without identifying the precincts where the returns originated.

Even prior to election day, it was clear that safety measures to ensure transparency were lacking. An example is the random manual count of over 200 precincts which is not at all random as the list was generated from 757 precincts preselected by Comelec computers. They insist that the tambiolo (raffle box) system should be utilized to pick precincts for manual counting in the verification of VCM results.