Court dismisses election protest vs Marilao mayor

Marilao, Bulacan (Google maps)

MANILA, Philippines — The Regional Trial Court Branch 21 of Malolos City has dismissed the election protest filed against Marilao, Bulacan Mayor Ricky Silvestre.

Presiding Judge Crisostomo Danguilan ruled in favor of Silvestre following the election protest filed by his rival in the mayoral race Jemina Sy, who lost by over 1,800 votes in the recent elections.

In the protest, Sy contested the results of the elections in 104 clustered precincts in Marilao, saying she “impugns and protests the said results on any of the following grounds” such as the alleged errors and uncertainties in the scanning and counting of the ballots by the vote-counting machines (VCMs); cases of votes not counted for checked, instead of shaded, ovals in the ballots; frequent breakdown of VCMs; non-issuance of voter’s receipts; among others.

Silvestre’s camp, headed by Atty. Romulo Macalintal and Atty. Ace Bautista, however, said that Sy’s use of the word “any” in her protest only showed that she “is fishing or will merely fish for evidence since she could not or did not even specify where the complained acts or omissions happened, how many ballots were affected, and how many ballots she would recover from the protested precincts.”

This, Silvestre’s lawyers said, also violates rules in filing a protest wherein a protester must provide “a detailed specification of the acts or omissions complained of as election frauds or anomalies.”

Further, Silvestre’s camp argued that by questioning the results in the precincts, Sy’s complaint was not an election protest, but rather a petition to declare failure of election in the protested precincts.

The Malolos RTC seconded this in a decision released July 22.

The decision cited the case of “Nilo Sy vs Bert Macias” in 2010, wherein the Supreme Court reiterated the principle that “a protest attacking all the precincts is reminiscent of a petition for failure of elections and not an election protest.”

The Malolos RTC added that the affidavit included in the complaint “may warrant a failure of election ‘on account of force on account of force majeure, violence, terrorism, fraud, or other analogous causes’, but it cannot prosper as an election protest.”

On Sy’s claims of errors or uncertainties in the casting of ballots and scanning of ballots by the VCMs, the court ruled that these “are at most technical in nature, with no clear sign of either fraud or irregularity.”

Further, the court noted that Sy’s use of the word “any” in the protest showed her failure to support her allegations.

“Clearly the mere choice and use of words indicate a scatter-shot approach on the matter in the hope that her allegations will land a chance of proving her claims,” the decision reads.

“Unfortunately, not only does the instant petition (of protest) fail to sufficiently allege a legitimate ground for an election protest to warrant a revision of the ballots, but the excessive and unnecessary averments only worsened protestant’s case, veering the issues away from an election controversy cognizable by the Court,” the decision concluded. /jpv