Brillantes: New poll commissioners OK

Commission on Elections Chairman Sixto Brillantes Jr. welcomed the appointment of Al L. Parreño and Louie Tito F. Guia as Comelec commissioners, saying the two lawyers would boost the election watchdog’s efforts to unclog its case dockets.

Presidential spokesman Edwin Lacierda confirmed Thursday that President Aquino had appointed the two lawyers, one of them a private prosecutor in the Corona impeachment trial last year.

Parreño and Guia will take the seats left vacant by the retirement of Election Commissioners Armando C. Velasco and Rene V. Sarmiento in February.

They will serve until Feb. 2, 2020. Their appointments are not covered by the ban on appointments during elections, Malacañang said.

“These two lawyers are OK,” Brillantes told reporters. [Guia] is practically a Comelec insider because he has been with us for a long time. He’s with the [Comelec Advisory Council]. He has been with Lente (Legal Network for Truthful Elections), so this is really his line,” he added.

“I don’t know Al Parreño,” Brillantes said. “I just heard he is a young lawyer. It’s OK because both of them are lawyers. They will help with our quasijudicial functions.”

Impeachment prosecutor

Parreño, together with 56 other private lawyers, signed up in January last year to help the House of Representatives team in prosecuting then Chief Justice Renato Corona in the Senate on charges of financial misdeclaration and violation of the Constitution.

On Day 24 of the trial, Parreño presented three videos taken by a TV crew of ABS-CBN showing Corona’s purported partiality toward former President and now Pampanga

Rep. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in November 2011.

Corona and seven other justices voted to lift a temporary restraining order on a Department of Justice watch-list order against Arroyo and her husband. Within minutes of the Supreme Court vote, the Arroyos tried to leave the country but were barred from taking their flight by authorities at the airport.

In May last year, 20 of the 23 senators voted to oust Corona from office after finding him guilty of misdeclaring his assets. Corona did not challenge the Senate’s ruling.

At the time of his appointment, Parreño was director of the Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board and had “proven his competence there,” Lacierda said.

“More than his role as a private prosecutor, his previous work experience as a project manager of several IT (information technology) projects was a factor in his selection as a Comelec commissioner. His contribution to the Comelec will primarily be in IT,” Lacierda said.

For clean elections

Guia was executive director of Lente, a civil society group advocating honest elections. He also served as international election consultant to other countries, among which were Papua New Guinea and Kenya, Lacierda said.

That background and his experience as an election lawyer were key factors in Guia’s appointment, he said.

“The President is confident that in assuming their new positions as (election) commissioners, they will demonstrate integrity, probity and independence in the conduct of their duties and further strengthen the Comelec in fulfilling its constitutional mandate to ensure free, orderly, honest, peaceful and credible elections,” Lacierda said.

Lacierda said this time, the Office of the President took longer to vet the qualifications of Parreño and Guia to avoid a repeat of the disastrous appointments in March of former Lanao del Norte politician Macabangkit Lanto and election lawyer Maria Bernadette Sardillo.

Aquino announced the appointments of Lanto and Sardillo during a visit to Davao City on March 7.

On March 8, Sardillo wrote Malacañang to decline her appointment for personal reasons.

Lanto’s appointment ran into opposition from critics, who remembered that the House of Representatives Electoral Tribunal booted him out of his seat in the House in 1994 for having benefited from electoral fraud in the second district of Lanao del Norte.

Lanto denied he cheated in the election, claiming he was a victim of a syndicate in the House tribunal.

Days later, however, he declined his appointment.

The Comelec-Employees Union issued a statement welcoming the appointments of Parreño and Guia to the election commission.

Harvey Keh, one of the founders of the Kaya Natin! Movement, welcomed Guia’s appointment.

“As executive director of Lente, Guia is more than capable to ensure that much-needed reforms continue to be implemented at the Comelec. Also, his expertise in monitoring campaign spending and finances will be a big asset in ensuring fair, clean and honest elections,” Keh said.

The announcement of the appointments of Parreño and Guia came at a time when Brillantes was threatening to quit over the adverse rulings by the Supreme Court against the Comelec’s resolutions on airtime limits to candidates’ TV and radio ads, and the party-list system.

With only three weeks to go before Election Day, Brillantes has urged the Supreme Court to immediately resolve the airtime case on its merits.