Spatiotemporal analysis of electoral transmission logs

Abstract

We determine if the Philippine national automated election results transmission logs, freely available at sub-barangay resolution nationwide, can be a high-resolution proxy for assessment for Internet connectivity. Using a 1-hour threshold after poll closing, we distinguish two questions at each administrative level: did the unit transmit anything (MIN), and did it finish (MAX)? Analysis of 88,585 transmission records across 41,248 barangays shows that while nearly all provinces established at least one early transmission, approximately 85% of provinces had every city still transmitting past the threshold, and 60% of cities had more than half their barangays incomplete. The growing gap between MIN and MAX aggregations across administrative scales, from 0.15 at the barangay level to 0.97 at the city/municipality-per-province level, provide hints of systemic broadband capacity inequality that is largely masked by server inefficiencies at the receiving end.