Mayor Lim wins vote recount; Atienza contests tally

MANILA, Philippines—The fight may be over as far as Manila Mayor Alfredo Lim is concerned but for his political opponent, former Mayor Lito Atienza, it is just beginning.

On Friday, a manual recount of the votes cast in 200 precincts in the 2010 mayoral polls in the city ended with Lim garnering 65,375 votes compared with Atienza’s 20,340. The other candidates, on the other hand, accounted for 12,427 votes.

“It was shown that the automated election results conformed with the results of the manual count done by the Commission on Elections (Comelec). Let this be a test case for all other similar protests. It is not true the automated count is different from the manual,” Lim’s chief of staff, Ricardo de Guzman, said in a statement.

The manual recount covering the results from 200 polling precincts was ordered by the Comelec to settle an electoral protest filed by Atienza who claimed that Lim had won by committing fraud in the country’s first automated elections.

De Guzman said the results of the manual recount showed Lim winning by a landslide in the city’s six districts. He added that they expected the Comelec to issue a ruling on the matter soon.

Sought for comment, Atienza said he was not about to give up just yet as he had asked Comelec to order a manual recount of the ballots from all of the city’s 1,411 precincts.

“We have filed a petition for the continuation of the opening of the next 200 ballot boxes,” he told the Inquirer in a phone interview.

Atienza added that they had evidence to prove that there were irregularities in the ballots thath were included in the recount.

“As far as we’re concerned, [the recount] isn’t over. We are not conceding anything because what we saw were tampered ballots,” he said.

The alleged irregularities, he added, included fictitious signatures, folded ballots and ballot boxes whose contents had been tampered with. “We believe the results were already encoded [before the 2010 elections] and the ballots were tampered with to conform with those results,” Atienza claimed.

“Anyway, [the Comelec has] requested us to deposit money for the recount of 1,411 precincts. The expenses are already covered so why not continue with the recount to satisfy the doubts being raised?” he said.

Atienza expressed hope that the poll body would see the merit of his petition to order the continuation of the manual recount.

During the 2010 automated elections, Lim received 395,910 votes compared with 181,094 for Atienza.