Court orders Compostela vote recount

HERE’S some good news for former Compostela Mayor Ritchie Wagas who was unseated by rival Joel Quiño following a Commission on Elections (Comelec) ruling last year.

The Mandaue Regional Trial Court Branch 55 granted his plea for a recount of votes in the town’s mayoralty race in the 2010 elections.

The revision of votes started yesterday at the RTC Branch 55 in Mandaue City which has jurisdiction in Compostela.

During the first round, there were major discrepancies between the total number of votes recorded by the Precinct Count Optical Scanner (PCOS) and the manual counting.

Quiño got 468 votes based on the PCOS count.

But durng the manual counting yesterday, he only had 214 votes in one of the clustered precincts in Compostela.

On the other hand, Wagas got 289 votes on the PCOS count.

In the manual counting, however, there were 288 votes in favor of Wagas who lost by a margin of 2,345 votes. Wagas said he just wants the truth to come out.

“The opening of the ballot boxes is already a victory. Sitting down as mayor of Compostela is already secondary…In life, there are two things which can’t be compromised: truth and justice,” he told Cebu Daily News.

He said the revision of ballots will test the accuracy of the PCOS machines.

Lawyer Guiller Ceniza, Quiño’s lawyer, questioned the revision of the ballots.

He said it didn’t comply with the rules of procedure in the conduct of election contests as laid out by the Comelec.

“Before the revision of ballots, there should be an authentication of ballots which is done through the PCOS machines. We posed a continuous objection to the opening of the ballot boxes (for the vote recount),” he told reporters.

Ceniza said he will file a motion in court to annul the proceedings. Reporter Ador Mayol