Dismiss Marcos poll protest, VP asks court
Credit to Author: Jomar Canlas, TMT| Date: Tue, 07 Jan 2020 17:01:21 +0000
Vice President Maria Leonor Robredo on Tuesday asked the Supreme Court to dismiss the election protest filed against her by former senator Ferdinand Marcos Jr.
In her memorandum, Robredo called on the high court, sitting as the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET), to junk the Marcos protest since there was no substantial recovery in his pilot provinces.
“With the failure of protestant Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. to show substantial recovery in his pilot provinces, the above-captioned election protest [should] be immediately dismissed,” it stated.
Robredo was referring to the second cause of action — revision of ballots in the provinces of Camarines Sur, Iloilo and Negros Occidental.
With a vote of 11 against 2, the PET ruled to reject the plea of Robredo and the recommendation of Justice Alfredo Benjamin Caguioa to dismiss the Marcos protest outright based on the three pilot provinces (Camarines Sur, Iloilo and Negros Occidental).
Caguioa and then-Supreme Court Justice Antonio Carpio lost in the voting since the majority of the justices ruled to keep the case alive.
But Marcos countered that there was fraud committed by Robredo and her camp in southern Mindanao and is now asking to proceed with the third cause of action — annulment of votes in the Mindanao provinces–Sulu, Basilan and Lanao del Sur.
With this, Robredo asked the PET to order Marcos to present evidence to justify the plea for technical examination of ballots.
“Notwithstanding the clear result of the revision, recount and reappreciation from the pilot provinces, the election protest will still proceed to the third cause of action, direct protestant Marcos to present evidence to justify resort to a technical examination of the Election Day Computerized Voter’s List vis-à-vis Voter’s Registration Records,” she said.
Robredo insisted that her counter-protest still survives since it is entirely independent of the election protest.
In his protest, Marcos assails the election results in 39,221 clustered precincts — 36,465 of which he pays for the conduct of manual count and judicial revision, while the remaining 2,756 he prays for the annulment of election results.
Based on Commission on Elections data, the 39,221 clustered precincts are composed of 132,446 precincts.
Marcos, who lost to Robredo by 263,473 votes in the May 2016 national elections, accused her of “massive electoral fraud, anomalies and irregularities” such as pre-shading of ballots, pre-loading of Secure Digital cards, misreading of ballots, malfunctioning vote counting machines and an “abnormally high unaccounted votes/undervotes for the position of VP (vice president).”