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Robredo opposes Marcos bid to secure election documents from Mindanao


Vice President Leni Robredo has opposed former senator Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr.'s bid to secure evidence of alleged election fraud from Mindanao, outside the three pilot provinces included in the current stage of his poll protest.

Through her lawyers, Robredo urged the Supreme Court, sitting as the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET), to deny for "utter lack of merit" Marcos' recent request for court action involving 2016 election documents from Lanao del Sur, Maguindanao and Basilan.

Citing information from former Sulu governor Abdusakur Tan, Marcos asked the PET to subpoena Commission on Elections (Comelec) reports about the technical examination of voter identification documents that allegedly indicated "massive substitute voting" in the three provinces.

Tan had filed an election protest against incumbent governor Mujiv Hataman and allegedly said a Comelec technical examination showed more than 40,000 voter signatures and more than 3,000 thumbprints did not match the ones in voter registration records.

Because of this, Marcos wanted the PET to order an examination of voter signatures and thumbprints on their registration papers as against the ones on election day voter lists in 2,756 of his own protested clustered precincts in Lanao del Sur, Maguindanao and Basilan.

Marcos said preserving the "vital documentary evidence" is crucial in supporting the third cause of action of his election protest: the annulment of 2016 poll results in the three provinces due to "widespread terrorism, violence, force, threats, intimidation, pre-shading of ballots, and substitution of voters."

Lanao del Sur, Maguindanao and Basilan are not among the three provinces Marcos chose to be covered by a manual vote recount before his protest could proceed to the rest of his contested poll precincts. The pilot provinces are Camarines Sur, Iloilo, and Negros Oriental.

"The motion is extremely premature and a deceitful way of circumventing the 2010 Rules of the Presidential Electoral Tribunal, as amended," Robredo's lawyers said in a Monday filing.

They said the decision on Marcos' request rests on whether or not he will be able to prove a "substantial recovery" of votes in his three pilot provinces.

But the defeated vice presidential candidate, they said, has failed to do so and is now "desperately trying to save his dying election protest."

"The provinces of Lanao del Sur, Basilan and Maguindanao not being among the designated pilot provinces, cannot be subject of any technical examination," Robredo's team said.

"Otherwise, protestant Marcos would be allowed to unduly expand his pilot provinces."

They also said the data cited by Marcos on the technical examination related to Tan's poll protest covered only 200 out of 2,834 clustered precincts in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao and have not yet been ruled upon by the Comelec.

At a press conference Thursday, Robredo's lead lawyer, Romulo Macalintal, said he estimates the presentation of evidence in connection with Marcos' three pilot provinces -- which will take place after the recount -- will be completed by June.

For now, the vice president's team is "happy" because the recount results are tallying with the election results as determined by vote-counting machines, Macalintal claimed.

He said the PET has finished the recount of ballots from Marcos' three pilot provinces and is now in the process of recounting ballot images in cases where the actual ballots can no longer be counted.

The results of the vote recount in the pilot provinces will determine whether or not Marcos' protest will proceed with the revision of ballots from 24 other provinces. After that, the 18 provinces in Robredo's counter-protest would have to be dealt with, Macalintal said.

If the current pace of the proceedings continues, he said he estimates the whole case may be decided in "seven years." Robredo's term will end in 2022, after which he said the case, if left unfinished, will be considered moot and academic.—LDF, GMA News

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