It’s final: 9-3 for Team PNoy

It’s 9-3 in favor of the administration coalition as the final three winning senators—Cynthia Villar, JV Ejercito and Gregorio Honasan—were finally proclaimed Saturday night as the Commission on Elections

(Comelec) completed the canvassing of all locally cast votes in the senatorial race.

Five days after the voting ended, the Comelec, sitting as the national board of canvassers (NBOC), proclaimed as winners Villar, Ejercito and Honasan, after the last local certificate of canvass  (COC) from Lanao del Norte arrived at 5.33 p.m.

Honasan successfully hung on to 12th place, beating Richard Gordon by a margin of more than 700,000 votes.

With the proclamation of all the winners, the scorecard of the mid-term senatorial election was 9-3, with the administration-backed Team PNoy winning nine slots. Only Nancy Binay, Ejercito and Honasan belong to the opposition United Nationalist Alliance.

After snubbing the Comelec’s previous proclamation ceremonies, winning candidates Binay and Aquilino Pimentel III showed up at the Philippine International Convention Center (PICC) Saturday night, receiving their certificates of proclamation together with Villar, Ejercito and Honasan.

Pimentel said he decided to show up Tuesday night after Comelec officials addressed the concerns that he raised on Friday.

“The proclamation [on Friday] was premature [but] I asked a lot of questions and I think the system is secure enough, and it’s now more difficult to manipulate than the one we used during the manual [voting],” he told reporters.

He was wearing a barong Tagalog when he arrived at the PICC about an hour after Comelec Chair Sixto Brillantes Jr. announced that the last three winning senators would be proclaimed Saturday night.

“They showed me that 100 percent of [the local votes] are in and that they’re just waiting for the OAV [overseas absentee vote]. If you sum it all up, the overseas vote, even theoretically speaking, it will no longer change the results,” he said.

Binay’s parents, Vice President Jojo Binay and Elenita Binay, were at the proclamation as were Ejercito’s parents, Manila Mayor Joseph Estrada and San Juan Mayor Guia Gomez.

Villar’s husband, Sen. Manuel Villar, and their two children were also at the ceremony where the Comelec commissioners took turns reading out the certificates of proclamation for Binay, Pimentel, Villar, Ejercito and Honasan.

The Comelec on Saturday finished the tabulation of 129 COCs out of a total of 304, with only the overseas votes left uncounted.

Spontaneous applause broke out in the national canvassing center at 5:30 p.m. at the announcement that the last locally drawn COC from Lanao del Norte had been received electronically at the PICC.

The 129 COCs represent 39,898,992 Filipino voters out of a voting population of 52 million.

All the COCs from 106 cities and provinces in the Philippines had been canvassed, and the only ones left uncounted came from overseas absentee voting centers, many of which yielded only a few votes. Of the 304 COCs, 198 COCs are international, while 106 are local.

Brillantes said the NBOC would go on recess after the proclamation and would resume the canvassing of the party-list polls on Monday.

The ranking of the first nine senatorial winners, who were proclaimed in batches on Thursday and Friday, was unchanged, with Grace Poe, the surprise top vote-getter, leading the pack.

She was followed by Loren Legarda, Alan Peter Cayetano, Francis Escudero, Nancy Binay and Sonny Angara. The six were officially proclaimed on Thursday night in alphabetical order.

The seventh to ninth placers, who were proclaimed on Friday night, were Bam Aquino, Pimentel and Antonio Trillanes IV.

In the final three places were Villar, Ejercito and Honasan, with Gordon in 13th place behind Honasan by more than 700,000 votes in the partial official tally.