Party-list group seeks seat

THE PARTY-LIST group Ating Guro on Monday asked the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to correct an error in the allocation of two seats to another group, which deprived the teachers’ group of a seat in the next Congress.

In its petition filed on Monday, Ating Guro said that using the Carpio formula, the Comelec should have allocated the remaining 35 seats in favor of the parties next in rank to Coop-Natcco, starting with Akbayan down to Ating Guro.

It urged the Comelec to correct the error in  National Board of Canvassers Resolution No. 008-16 and allocate only one guaranteed seat to Coop-Natcco and annul its proclamation and announcement of an additional seat supposedly won by the party.

Ating Guro noted how the application of the Carpio formula for additional seats resulted in Coop-Natcco only getting 0.97550 —not a whole integer—which meant it was not entitled to a share of the remaining available seats.

The ruling in the Banat case against Comelec in 2009 stated that “the whole integer of the product of the percentage and of the remaining available seats corresponds to a party’s share in the remaining available seats,” the teachers said.

In the Banat case, Associate Justice Antonio Carpio laid down a three-stage formula for determining how many seats should be allocated to winning party-list groups.

In the first stage, the first seat is given to parties that obtain a minimum of 2 percent of the total votes cast in a party-list election. In the second stage, the parties get one or two additional seats based on the allocation of the remaining seats.

The process goes on to a third stage if there were seats left from the party-list quote for distribution. Jocelyn R. Uy