Presidential aspirant Sen. Grace Poe. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO
MANILA, Philippines — Senator Grace Poe said on Thursday only the Supreme Court could stop her presidential bid as her camp insisted that the Commission on Elections unfairly set aside documents proving her residency in the Philippines since May 2005.
“I want to assure you that our fight is on. I was not disqualified by one division of the Commission on Elections because this is not final,” Poe said at a press briefing immediately after the Senate Electoral Tribunal affirmed with a 5-4 vote that she is a natural-born Filipino.
The Comelec’s Second Division on Tuesday ruled to disqualify Poe from the 2016 presidential race for making false statements about her period of residency in the country and her status as a natural-born Filipino.
“We still have the Supreme Court to go to. If you can remember, the same thing happened to FPJ (Fernando Poe Jr.) when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of him in March (before the May elections in 2004),” Poe said.
“It is important that my name is not removed from the ballots,” Poe said.
The ruling of the Comelec on Tuesday was on the petition filed by former Government Service Insurance System lawyer Estrella Elamparo, the first of the four disqualification cases filed against Poe.
Her lawyer George Garcia on Thursday presented to the media some of the evidence and documents presented to the Comelec to prove Poe’s residency in the Philippines since May 24, 2005.
“We have presented 400 pages of documents to prove that she has been a resident of the Philippines since 2005,” Garcia said.
Poe’s counsel said their camp would raise in their motion for reconsideration set to be filed at the Comelec on Monday that these documents and evidence were set aside and not tackled.
“No single evidence we presented was discussed,” he said, noting that the Comelec relied on a single document, which was the Certificate of Candidacy Poe filed at the Comelec for the 2013 elections.
Poe’s camp has been claiming that “an honest mistake” was committed and there was no deliberate intention to make a false statement.
The Comelec dismissing their evidence, Garcia said, constituted a grave abuse of discretion.
He noted that even the Comelec admitted that the question ‘Period of Residence in the Philippines before May 13, 2013,” in the COC was vague by changing its phrasing.
“They rephrased it so that no one will be confused on how to compute their residency so they actually admitted that they are confusing,” Garcia said. SFM