WIKIPEDIA now describes Ferdinand R. Marcos, Jr. as “President-elect” of the Philippines who is “assuming office” on June 30, 2022.
Marcos won a clear mandate from the people. His 31 million votes dwarfed the votes cast for his closest rival Vice President Leni Robredo.
With everything over but the shouting, will the Supreme Court brush all of this aside, cancel Marcos’ certificate of candidacy, and effectively defeat the sovereign will expressed in the ballot?
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This question arises because of petitions now pending in the Supreme Court questioning the putative President’s eligibility to be a candidate for elective office on account of tax issues that are argued to be grounds for the cancellation of his certificate of candidacy.
Pundits have made the issue exciting by injecting the question of who ascends to the Presidency should the High Court decide in favor of the petitioners.
Is it Sara Duterte, the Vice-President-elect, or is it Vice President Leni Robredo?
Robredo would garner the highest number of votes on the assumption that Marcos votes are stray votes cast in favor of a candidate whose COC is null and void.
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The issue appears to be settled as applied to the election of heads of local government units.
For example, in the 2013 ruling of Maquiling vs. Comelec, the Supreme Court proclaimed as Mayor the candidate who secured the second highest number of votes after canceling the COC of the winning candidate. It was not the Vice Mayor-elect who was proclaimed.
The decision said that an ineligible candidate who receives the highest number of votes is a wrongful winner. By express legal mandate, he could not even have been a candidate in the first place.
According to the Supreme Court, ineligibility does not only pertain to his qualifications as a candidate but necessarily affects his right to hold public office. The number of ballots cast in his favor cannot cure the defect of failure to qualify with the substantive legal requirements of eligibility to run for public office.
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Should the will of the electorate be upheld? Not necessarily, according to the Supreme Court.
In that Maquiling ruling, the Court said that when a person who is not qualified is voted for and eventually garners the highest number of votes, even the will of the electorate expressed through the ballot cannot cure the defect in the qualifications of the candidate.
To rule otherwise is to trample upon and rent asunder the very law that sets forth the qualifications and disqualifications of candidates.
It would therefore appear that jurisprudence favors the proclamation of Robredo should the Supreme Court decide to cancel Marcos’ COC.
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But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
The judiciary can avoid the question altogether by merely affirming the rulings of the Commission on Elections that uniformly dismissed the petitions questioning Marcos’ eligibility to run for elective office.
Essentially, the Comelec said that while the Court of Appeals had indeed affirmed the finding that Marcos failed to file income tax returns, the appellate court was silent on whether the latter is perpetually barred from holding public office.
Also, that the 1977 Internal Revenue Code does not automatically impose upon offenders the penalty of perpetual disqualification to hold public office.
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All these discussions on filling the vacuum left by a disqualified President are being fueled by speculations that the outgoing President is trying to maneuver the early ascension of his daughter to the highest elective post in the land.
But it underestimates the virtues of judicial restraint, which at this time appears to be a convenient compromise to avoid questions that can shake the core of democratic exercises.
After all, the judiciary can always claim that it does not operate in a vacuum – aloof from the will of the electorate, unpopular that may be to a substantial chunk of the population./PN
