Manila – The Supreme Court (SC), sitting as the Presidential Electoral Tribunal, deferred voting on former senator Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.’s election protest against Vice President Leni Robredo.
Based on a media advisory on Tuesday, the high court justices have decided to hold the voting on Marcos’ protest on October 8. The verdict on the case should have come out yesterday.
SC Associate Justice Alfredo Caguioa already submitted a report on the recount and the revision of ballots from three provinces but the high court justices two weeks ago.
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.
The ballot recount covered 5,415 election precincts in three pilot provinces chosen by Marcos: Camarines Sur, Iloilo and Negros Oriental. The results of the recount will determine whether or not the case will proceed to Marcos’ remaining contested voting precincts.
Robredo, in an interview on Tuesday, said that she is hopeful the SC will come out with a favorable decision on the electoral protest.
“We cannot speak ahead of the court’s decision and I can’t discuss the case’s merits, but we hope for a favorable decision considering that we know what happened during the entire process,” Robredo said.
“As I have said in the past, as long as the case is pending, there is a platform for them to spread propaganda which most of the time is fake news. So we hope it is decided upon,” she added./PN
