Robredo urges PET to junk Bongbong Marcos’ poll protest

Vice President Leni Robredo on Monday urged the Supreme Court, acting as the Presidential Electoral Tribunal, to junk the bid of election rival and former Senator Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. unseat her. 

Responding to Marcos' petition, Robredo assailed Marcos' claims that cheating operations were made to ensure her victory in the May 9 polls. 

Marcos, who lost to Robredo by around 260,000 votes, grounded his protest on three parts.

The first shows that the system had vulnerabilities that were not remedied by technology provider Smartmatic, and as a result, some groups exploited these flaws to reduce his votes and increase the votes of Robredo.

To which, Robredo said: "Surely, this could not be a ground to contest the election of Robredo since an election protest is a contest between two  candidates and not a case involving the problem between Comelec and Smartmatic." 

Marcos also said there are specific pieces of evidence of vote buying, intimidation, failure of elections, pre-shading, wholesale ballot feeding and the other abuses reported by the media.

Included in the second part of Marcos’ protest is a request for annulment of the results of elections in the provinces of Lanao del Sur, Maguindanao and Basilan.

But the Vice President's camp belittled the allegations, saying these are "mere series of wild accusations, guesses, and surmises which renders it miserably wanting in sufficiency both in form and substance."

“However, Marcos’ protest itself reveals the weakness of his position because he merely cited four municipalities in Lanao del Sur; one  municipality in Maguindanao and four (municipalities in Basilan or a total of only 9 areas or a measly 10 percent of the 88 municipalities and cities of these three provinces to have been allegedly affected by his apparently baseless and frivolous allegations of frauds and irregularities in these areas,” Robredo said.

Robredo also belied Marcos’ claim that the changes in the transparency server changed the results of the election and the existence of an alleged queue server.

“The changing of the source code for the Comelec’s transparency server was not a fraudulent act or irregularity that affected the results of the May 2016 elections for Vice President. The Comelec already explained that the source code changes did not affect the data collected by the transparency server”, Robredo said. 

She added that she was proclaimed Vice President by Congress – acting as the National Board of Canvassers (NBOC)– based on the data transmitted by the canvassing laptops of the various provincial boards of canvassers that elected their own representatives in Congress.  

On the issue of queue server, Robredo said the review of source code was made by the Comelec with due notice and in the presence of political parties. 

"And for emphasis, there is no queue/intermediary server used during the elections. The problem with Marcos is that he did not attend any of the review of the source code conducted by the Comelec despite notice and invitation by the Comelec,” the Vice President said. — RSJ, GMA News