MANILA – The Supreme Court (SC) has ordered the release of the committee report on the result of revision of ballots from three pilot provinces chosen by former Sen. Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos in his election protest against Vice President Leni Robredo.
In an en banc session on Tuesday, the High Court, sitting as the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET) ruled to release to the parties the report on the revision and appreciation of ballots in the 3 pilot provinces and for them to comment thereon.
The pilot provinces of Camarines Sur, Negros Occidental and Iloilo were chosen by Marcos as the provinces he believes had the most number of cheatings committed.
The PET also asked the two parties to “submit memoranda on the various issues relating to the jurisdiction and other matters on the third cause of action of the case, which is the annulment of election results for Vice President in the provinces of Lanao Del Sur, Basilan and Maguindanao.
The parties are required to submit their comments to the tribunal within a period of 20 days from receipt of the notice.
Last month, Associate Justice Benjamin Caguioa submitted a report to the tribunal regarding the recount or revision of ballots from Marcos’ chosen pilot provinces.
In Caguioa’s draft ruling, he reportedly recommended for the outright dismissal of Marcos’ poll protest against Robredo for lack of merit.
Marcos only lost the vice presidential race to Robredo by 263,473 votes in the final and official tally by Commission on Elections. Marcos garnered 14,155,344 votes while Robredo got a total of 14,418,817.
In his election protest, the former senator questioned the election results in 39, 221 clustered precincts in some 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 position of vice president.
Robredo’s camp has earlier urged the tribunal to junk the electoral protest, claiming that the vice president’s lead even grew by 15,000 votes when the initial recount ended but the SC dismissed the petition as “speculative.”/PN
