MANILA – Supreme Court Chief Justice Lucas Bersamin denied a verdict has been reached about the electoral protest Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. filed against Vice President Leni Robredo.
Bersamin said it was not true that the high court justices have voted 8-6 in favor of Marcos, as reported in a broadsheet on Thursday.
“You ask the columnist what her or his basis. I cannot confirm or deny that because he must know more than I do. That’s the bad part about it. There is no definite voting yet or anything that happened in that particular case,” Bersamin said.
Associate Justice Alfredo Benjamin Caguioa submitted his report on the revision and recount of ballots on the three pilot provinces Iloilo, Camarines Sur and Negros Oriental chosen by Marcos.
Bersamin, meanwhile, said even with Caguioa’s report, the tribunal is not obliged to approve it.
“When a report is issued, it does not necessarily mean that we have to consider that report, approve it, adopt it etc… It’s not automatic, otherwise we will not be a deliberative body, a collegial body,” Bersamin added.
Marcos lost the vice presidential race to Robredo by only 263,473 votes in the final and official tally of the Commission on Elections. He garnered 14,155,344 votes while Robredo got a total of 14,418,817 votes.
In his protest, the former senator questioned the election results in 39,221 clustered precincts in around 25 provinces and five cities all over the country involving around 9-million votes.
Marcos cited alleged pre-shading of ballots, massive vote buying, script change in the transparency server that supposedly altered the results, pre-loaded secure digital cards, misreading of ballots, malfunctioning vote counting machines, and an “abnormally high” unaccounted votes/undervotes for the vice presidential position./PN
