Marcos fraud claim just media stunt, says Leni’s lawyer

Election lawyer Romulo Macalintal. JULLIANE LOVE DE JESUS/INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

Poll lawyer Romulo Macalintal branded the election fraud claims of former Sen. Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s camp a “media stunt” after they failed to respond to the former’s challenge.

Macalintal said he challenged Marcos or his spokesperson, lawyer Vic Rodriguez, to show up in front of the Manila Cathedral on Tuesday morning. They did not show up.

Macalintal is Vice President Leni Robredo’s election lawyer.

“The absence … is a clear admission and proof that their claimed massive electoral fraud on the 13 SD cards retrieved from unused vote counting machines (VCMs) was baseless, frivolous, self-serving and were merely intended as a media stunt,” Macalintal said in a statement.

Resign

Macalintal had said he would resign as Robredo’s legal counsel and surrender his license as a lawyer to the Supreme Court if the Marcos camp is able to prove cheating.

But if it fails to do so, Macalintal said it should withdraw its electoral protest before the Presidential Electoral Tribunal against Robredo’s victory in the May 2016 polls.

“This is the best way to prove who is telling the truth on these 13 SD cards to prevent the proliferation of false, misleading and self-serving claims, which are clearly aimed to condition the minds of the justices of the PET and the electorate as to the true merits of the election protest,” he said.

Earlier, the Marcoses alleged that 13 of the 26 SD cards which the Comelec decrypted two weeks ago had folders containing data, which it claimed was proof of massive election fraud.

The Comelec conducted the decryption of the SD cards from the 1,356 unused VCMs which were subjected to a stripping procedure in October 2016.

Robredo won the vote last year by a narrow margin, getting 14,418,817 votes compared to Marcos’ 14,155,344 votes.