The Commission on Elections (Comelec) has dismissed defeated Pasay mayoral candidate Consuelo Dy’s electoral protest against incumbent Mayor Antonino Calixto, saying she failed to prove her allegations.
In an order issued on April 20 but released only yesterday, the poll body’s Second Division junked the case after a manual recount of the ballots cast in 74 pilot clustered precincts showed no significant difference in terms of votes garnered by both candidates compared to the official election results in 2010.
“The recorded results in the physical or manual count as well as the automated results from the said election documents do not show any significant difference between the types of application in the counting of votes in the pilot precincts,” the order read.
It added that while results from nine out of the 74 pilot clustered precincts where ballots were physically counted slightly differed from the automated results, “[t]hese variations, however, are negligible or minimal with protestant gaining only nine votes while protestee’s votes remain the same.”
“The variations could perhaps be attributed more to dissimilarities in human perception during the recount process and less to the count made by the PCOS [precinct count optical scan] machines themselves,” the order read.
At this rate, the Comelec said that even under the best scenarios for Dy, Calixto’s votes “could not be trounced in the precincts chosen by protestant [Dy] to establish that there is reasonable ground in her protest to overcome the lead of the proclaimed candidate.”
Calixto defeated Dy in the 2010 elections with a total of 59,087 votes against his opponent’s 56,576 votes.