‘Zubiri may not be only beneficiary’

If resigned Senator Juan Miguel Zubiri had benefitted from manipulated elections in Maguindanao in 2007, was he the only one?

Ten other incumbent senators also received a significant number of votes in the province, which is something election lawyer Romulo Macalintal on Saturday said the Department of Justice and Commission on Elections should also look into.

“Everyone should probably be the subject of investigation,” he said when asked by the Inquirer about the contested certificates of canvass (COCs) in 2007. “Because if indeed there was cheating in Maguindanao, then all those who got votes are suspect,” added Macalintal, who was among Zubiri’s lawyers in the election protest filed by rival candidate Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel III.

A copy of the COCs of the province showed that Zubiri received the most number of votes at 195,823. The results prompted Pimentel—who got only 67,111 votes—to file an election protest, which he is expected to win in the coming weeks.

Macalintal said there was a “presumption of regularity” in the votes received by the other senators unless they were formally questioned.

The incumbent senators include Edgardo Angara (193,990 votes), Joker Arroyo (193,012), Francis Escudero (81,171), Gregorio Honasan (64,978), Loren Legarda (64,070), Francis Pangilinan (50,068), Ralph Recto (190,654), Vicente Sotto III (184,538), Antonio Trillanes IV (2,147) and Manuel Villar (73,835).

The results were based on the number of votes cast in 1,078 out of 1,116 precincts in Maguindanao. Macalintal said an investigation into their votes would essentially require an examination of the election returns, which were the basis for the COC.

The joint DOJ-Comelec committee established to investigate alleged cheating in the 2004 and 2007 elections is now preparing the rules for its inquiry.

Macalintal said the committee should clarify the limitations of its function and noted that its rules would take effect only after they had been promulgated and published.

Probe automated polls too

But beyond the controversies in the previous elections, he urged the authorities to also focus on reported cheating in the country’s first-ever automated national elections last year.

“We should move on,” he said. “We’ve been talking about problems in the manual elections, but there were also problems in the automated elections.”

Macalintal cited supposedly tampered ballots in areas such as Camarines Norte and Davao del Sur. He said a careful examination of such ballots showed that some areas previously left blank by voters had reportedly been shaded to favor a particular candidate.

In other instances, he claimed additional shading was made to invalidate an entire ballot. He said questions were settled only after the retrieval of “picture images” of the ballots when they were fed into the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines.

Zubiri resigned his Senate seat on August 3, a few weeks after former Maguindanao poll supervisor Lintang Bedol came out and said the 2007 legislative poll results were falsified in favor of candidates of then President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.

Without admitting fault

Zubiri said he was resigning “without admitting any fault and with my vehement denial of the alleged electoral fraud hurled against me.”

Zubiri’s critics, however, said Zubiri’s spurious lead in Maguindanao was clear as early as June 2008 but the Bukidnon politician had effectively stalled Pimentel’s proclamation by filing a counter-protest that demanded a recount in over 73,000 precincts.

The Senate Electoral Tribunal voted to give due course to Zubiri’s demand for what Pimentel complained was virtually a nationwide recount.

Zubiri finally withdrew his controversial counter-protest last Thursday.

Arroyo is also accused by critics of cheating in the 2004 polls, also via syndicated cheating in Maguindanao.