Southern discomfort for 3 losing candidates
The protesters included one mayoral candidate who lost by just 602 votes, another who didn’t win in a single polling precinct, and a congressional bet who trailed the proclaimed winner by almost 10,000 votes.
Losing candidates in the southern cities of Pasay and Parañaque and the municipality of Pateros either staged mass actions or threatened to take legal action over the results of the May 13 midterm elections.
Supporters of Parañaque 2nd District congressional candidate Joey Marquez held what they called a “prayer protest” in front of the local Commission on Elections (Comelec) office in Barangay (village) San Antonio near City Hall on Friday. The predominantly female crowd mainly alleged that “flying voters” were used in the elections that saw incumbent Vice Mayor Gustavo Tambunting winning the House seat for the district.
Tambunting was proclaimed winner Tuesday with 57,471 votes over Marquez’s 47,912 votes and independent candidate Pacifico Rosal’s 2,992.
City election officer Jonalyn Sabellano said “they were obviously just sourgraping.”
“These are baseless accusations. They had the voters’ list even before the elections. If they had any complaints, there were proper forums for redress and they didn’t use them,” Sabellano told the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
She noted that representative-elect Tambunting had a whopping 10,000-vote lead over Marquez even though the former ran under the party of losing mayoral candidate Benjo Bernabe. “It seems the people have really spoken. Let’s just respect it,” she said.
She reminded the protesters that there were proper venues for their complaints and that losing candidates have 10 days after the proclamation to file electoral protests in the Comelec main office in Intramuros, Manila.
In Pateros town, mayoralty candidate Miguel Ponce III questioned the proclamation of reelectionist Joey Medina as mayor and the canvassing results showing him winning by just 602 votes.
“We will file election protest on Tuesday. I would want to move on but there’s a public clamor to unearth the truth,” said Ponce, a corporate lawyer who ran under the Liberal Party, whose supporters staged a demonstration in front of the municipal hall.
Medina won a third consecutive term with 12,886 votes, beating Ponce who got 12,284.
But Ponce alleged that based on the total number of votes cast out of the total 33,992 registered voters in Pateros, there were around 800 votes that remained unaccounted for.
“What we want is a manual recount of these votes,” Ponce said. The defeated candidate also cited reports of vote-buying and “preshaded” ballots turning up at the polling precincts, anomalies that he said would be contained in affidavits to be executed by eyewitnesses gathered by his camp.
In Pasay, former Mayor Peewee Trinidad, who lost by a big margin to incumbent Mayor Antonino Calixto, also disclosed plans to file an electoral protest.
Trinidad claimed that the CF (compact flash) cards for the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines used in the elections were “reprogrammed” to make Calixto win.
The incumbent garnered 119,177 or three-fourths of the votes cast in the city. Businessman Jorge del Rosario was a distant second with 28,951 while Trinidad got 22,028. A fourth candidate, Romulo Marcelo, got 1,060 votes. Trinidad and Del Rosario did not top any polling precinct in Pasay.
“It was so unbelievable that I did not win in a single polling precinct,” Trinidad told the Inquirer. Jaymee T. Gamil and Niña P. Calleja
