Bautista: I’ve always been present

COMMISSION on Elections (Comelec) Chair Andres Bautista on Sunday belied claims by Commissioner Rowena Guanzon that he refused to discuss issues the commissioners had raised regarding some of his decisions.

Bautista also denied Guanzon’s statement that he had not been presiding over the Comelec en banc for more than a month now.

“I’m presiding regularly over our regular en banc meetings. I have never been absent,” Bautista told the Inquirer over the phone.

But he admitted that there was an instance when he held back calling for a meeting, after a senior Comelec official was yelled at by another commissioner while he was in his office.

“I was there in the office, then before the meeting was called, a commissioner was reprimanding a senior official in front of the other officials. Minumura at binabastos talaga siya (The commissioner was being rude and was cursing him),” Bautista said but he did not name the commissioner or the senior official.

“I told them that whenever we hold meetings, we should respect one another. We can disagree without being disagreeable. But that was just one meeting,” he said.

Bautista also said that during their last meeting, they were able to tackle issues raised by the six commissioners in their  memorandum detailing their objections to his management decisions.

“Everybody was present last Tuesday. We tackled barangay polls, hacking, payment for poll honoraria, all of these issues were discussed,” he said.

Addressing the delay in the payment of election workers, Bautista said that based on the report of the finance service department, 99.9  percent of election staff had received their honoraria.