Peña: I’ll win in a manual vote recount

PEÑA

DEFEATED Makati City mayoral candidate Romulo “Kid” Peña on Friday filed an electoral protest in the Commission on Elections (Comelec) against Rep. Abigail Binay, who had trounced him by more than 17,000 votes.

In an interview, Peña claimed to have evidence of massive vote-buying and fraud, saying many vote-counting machines (VCMs) used in the city did not credit the votes for him.

The incumbent mayor also alleged that some voters and poll watchers at certain precincts suffered harassment during the May 9 balloting.

“We have cases, we have statements that there was fraud and vote-buying. There are those who say they were harassed and driven away,” said Peña, whose supporters had earlier staged two post-election rallies against Binay at the Makati City Hall grounds.

Peña demanded a manual recount, particularly in the city’s 2nd district, saying it would prove he was the real winner.

In his Comelec petition, Peña questioned the canvassed results from 287 of
the 559 clustered precincts in Makati, where the tally showed him earning 142,315 votes against Binay’s 160,120.

“The results in the protested precincts are not reflective of the actual votes cast therein due to electoral fraud, iregularities and/or errors in the conduct of the elections, technical malfunctions in the VCMs, irregularities in the canvassing process, among others, resulting in massive disenfranchisement of the voters of Makati,” he said.

“Had the votes in these precincts been correctly canvassed, (I) would have emerged as the duly-elected mayor of the city of Makati,” added Peña, the vice mayor who took over as mayor nine months ago when Binay’s brother Junjun was dismissed by the Office of the Ombudsman due to corruption charges.