HRET junks election protest vs Manila Rep. Lopez

Manila 1st district Rep. Manuel Luis “Manny” Lopez. Image from the House of Representatives website

MANILA, Philippines — The House of Representatives Electoral Tribunal (HRET) has dismissed the poll protest against Manila 1st District Rep. Manuel Luis “Manny” Lopez filed by his losing opponent former congressman Benjamin Asilo.

In a resolution dated August 27, a copy of which was shared to the media on Thursday, the HRET said Asilo filed his protest “on a mere gut feel or suspicion that the election results do not reflect the will of the electorate of the First District of Manila.”

“The instant election protest dated July 5, 2019 filed on July 8, 2019 is DISMISSED for being insufficient in form and substance,” the resolution states.

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‘Questions on the mind’

According to the resolution, Asilo’s protest questioned his loss in the 2019 elections despite having emerged as the most likely winner of the congressional race in the first district of Manila based on three local surveys conducted pre-election.

“In Paragraph 6 thereof, he asserted that he was on the verge of accepting his defeat in the congressional race if not for the ‘question hanging on the minds’ of his community leaders, allies, supporters and family as to whether ‘the result of the election for Congressman in the First District of Manila reflect the will of the people,’ that made them decide to have a recount of ballots,” the resolution stated.

The HRET further said that Asilo also raised concerns over the early transmittal of election results during the canvassing proceedings, the failure of the election officer to provide him a printed copy of the Statement of Votes by Precinct of nine clustered precincts in the district, and the alleged inconsistency in the tallies of their manual counting as against both the printed election results and the results transmitted to the District Board of Canvassers.

Likewise, the resolution also states that Asilo also alleged that there were more or less 10,000 votes that were missing and/or unaccounted for for the position of congressman.

In the end of his protest, Asilo urged for the manual recounting of votes or the verification or re-tabulation of the election returns with the lost of voters.

‘Failure to show a valid course of action’

But the HRET ultimately decided to junk the protest.

According to the resolution, during a preliminary conference held on October 30, 2019, Asilo informed the HRET that he would no longer present his 112 witnesses and their respective Sinumpaang Salaysay, and instead, said he would only present a technical examination expert who will testify on the results of the technical examination of signatures and/or thumb marks of the voters found in the Election Day Computerized Voters’ Lists in the protested clustered precincts.

However, HRET said that by no longer presenting his witnesses, the allegations in Asilo’s protests “are not allegations of ultimate facts but of conclusions of fact and thus, it failed to show a valid cause of action.”

The resolution states that “protestant’s act of doing away with the testimonies of his 112 intended witnesses supposedly as proof of the the ‘traditional election irregularities, manipulations and anomalies’ alleged in his protest only shows that his causes of action are not lodged in the election frauds, irregularities and anomalies given by said witnesses but on the alleged ‘shocking discrepancy’ between the number of voters ‘who actually voted’ as against the ‘total number of combined votes obtained’” by both Asilo and Lopez.

“However, the Tribunal does not accept a mere allegation of the existence of a questionable mathematical disparity of votes for it fails to establish a cause of action necessary to initiate an action before the Tribunal,” the resolution states.

“Allegations based solely on Mathematica assumptions and conjectures are devoid of substance and would not qualify as specific acts or omissions constituting electoral fraud, anomalies or irregularities,” it adds.

The resolution adds that the “bare allegations” on the technical glitches and errors in the Vote Counting Machines (VCMs)and the Consolidated Canvassing System (CCS), including the purported missing nine Statement of Votes by Precincts of the First District of Manila, “would now only pass as a mere general charges of election frauds, irregularities and anomalies that are given to support a plain and simple hunch that he should have won the congressional elections…”

Lopez defeated Asilo in the 2019 congressional elections by more than 13,000 votes.

“Since the beginning, we are confident that the will of the people and the choice of my constituents will emerge victorious against this obvious political maneuver. We thank the HRET for settling this matter once and for all,” Lopez said in a statement.

“Our landslide win was clear and irrefutable that even our opponent failed to present his supposed ‘witnesses’,” he added.