ILLUSTRATION BY RENE ELEVERA
Nearly two years after Vice President Leni Robredo won a tight race over her closest rival, former Sen. Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., the Supreme Court convened itself into the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET) to do a manual recount of the ballots cast for the vice presidential elections.
Robredo had a slim lead of 260,000 votes, and Marcos, son of the late strongman Ferdinand Marcos Sr., filed an electoral protest demanding a recount of votes in 39,221 clustered precincts in Bato, Camarines Sur province, in the Bicol Region, where Robredo hails from.
Specifically, Marcos wants a manual recount of votes in 36,465 polling precincts and the nullification of votes from the remaining 2,756 voting precincts.
Robredo lodged a counterprotest, questioning results in about 8,000 voting precincts.
On the day the PET opened the recount last Monday, the Vice President attended Mass at St. Scholastica’s College and remained calm, but admitted the fight might be difficult.
“[B]ut as long as what we are fighting for is right, there will be light in the end,” she told her supporters.
At the Supreme Court, Marcos immediately raised the issue of the missing audit logs of ballot boxes in 38 of the 42 voting precincts in Bato and questioned why ballots in four other boxes were damp.
But Robredo’s lawyer, Romulo Macalintal, dismissed Marcos’ complaints as immaterial to his claim of election irregularities and said that a radical difference between the number of votes in the recounted ballots and the votes used in the proclamation was the needed proof.
Robredo, meanwhile, asked the electoral tribunal to follow the 25-percent threshold set by the Commission on Elections for the shading of ballots in the 2016 elections, instead of the 50-percent threshold set by the PET in a 2010 regulation.
The inconsistency, she said, would result in a systematic decrease in her votes and disenfranchise the valid votes cast for her in her bailiwick.
The PET said it would follow the 50-percent threshold percentage in the recount of Robredo’s and Marcos’ votes.