MANILA, Philippines ? The Supreme Court sitting as Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET) has issued a temporary protection order requiring the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to secure the integrity of the ballots which would be part of the evidence in the election protest filed by former Senator Manuel Roxas against Vice President Jejomar Binay.

In a two-page order released Thursday, the high court told the Comelec ?our agents, representatives or persons acting in your place or stead, including the municipal treasurers, election officers and the responsible personnel and custodians are hereby directed to preserve and safeguard the integrity of the ballot boxes, their contents and keys, list of voters with voting records, books of voters and other documents and paraphernalia used in the May 2010 elections for the position of Vice President of the Republic of the Philippines.?

The high tribunal also ordered the safeguard of data storage devices containing the results of last May?s elections in the contested 76,340 clustered precincts that have been the subject of the Protest and Counter-Protest filed by the two contending parties.

Roxas sought to annul the proclamation of rival Jejomar Binay as the duly elected vice president, claiming there were about three million votes that were not counted during the canvassing, resulting in his defeat in the May 10 polls.

In the protest, Roxas urged the PET to conduct a manual revision of votes and order a complete and accurate count of votes that were not canvassed and considered stray or null by the Commission on Elections (Comelec).

He also asked the Supreme Court to create and constitute a technical panel of independent experts that would conduct a comprehensive, system-wide forensic analysis and comparison of the country's first automated election system (AES) to "ensure that the true will of the electorate is upheld."

According to the petition, the certificates of canvass (COCs) that formed the basis of Binay's proclamation were not duly and properly authenticated, as these failed to meet all legal requirements for the determination of authenticity and due execution of the COCs for vice president, in violation of the Constitution.

The former senator said that the votes intended for him were unaccounted for, as there were several precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines comprising clustered precincts that were not transmitting the actual election results but the final testing and sealing (FTS) results, a fact officially admitted and documented by the Comelec.

Roxas said the anomalously high incidence of null/misread votes were not only relevant but also crucial for the vice presidential race, considering the narrow margin of just 727,084 votes between him and Binay.

On June 9, Binay was proclaimed by the National Board of Canvassers as the winner of the vice presidential contest, with 14,645,574 votes obtained, as against Roxas's 13,918,490.