Vice President Leni Robredo and former Senator Bongbong Marcos (FILE PHOTOS)
Learn to handle failure and move on.
Vice President Leni Robredo on Friday offered this unsolicited advice to her political rival, former Sen. Ferdinand Marcos Jr., as she asked the Supreme Court, sitting as the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET), to spurn his appeal to overturn her victory in the 2016 national elections.
“Marcos has no one to blame but himself for the dismissal of his election protest,” Robredo said in a 51-page comment filed by her lawyers.
“In the end, protestant Marcos needs to concede and accept his defeat with grace,” she said.
With less than a year before the next balloting, the son of dictator Ferdinand Marcos has not given up his fight to void Robredo’s win after he urged the magistrates to recall their Feb. 16 decision.
But the Vice President insisted there was no reason for the PET to alter its ruling, which jettisoned for lack of merit Marcos’ claim that she edged him out for the country’s second-highest elective post through cheating and massive electoral fraud.
In fact, Robredo said, the electoral body had already passed upon and unanimously rejected all the arguments that her opponent raised anew in the motion for reconsideration he filed on May 6.
She stressed that Marcos failed to prove his allegations during the manual revision and recount of ballots from several polling precincts in Iloilo, Camarines Sur and Negros Oriental, which he himself had identified as the pilot provinces where electoral fraud was rampant.
Instead, Robredo received an additional 15,000 votes, further widening her margin over Marcos by almost 280,000 votes.
As correctly decided by the PET, the Vice President said his unsuccessful attempt to discredit her triumph in Marcos’ own pilot provinces was enough reason for the justices to thumb down his third cause of action to annul the election results in Lanao del Sur, Maguindanao and Basilan.
She said this was clearly stated in Rule 65 of the PET, which states that “if upon examination of such ballots and proof … the tribunal is convinced that … the protestant or counterprotestant will most probably fail to make out his case, the protest may forthwith be dismissed, without further consideration of the other provinces mentioned in the protest.”
“(T)he importance of protestant Marcos being able to show substantial recovery in his pilot provinces cannot be brushed aside and just swept under the rug, ” she said. INQ