Bongbong to sue Smartmatic’s Marlon Garcia

The camp of vice presidential candidate Sen. Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. is set to file a formal complaint against Smartmatic project director Marlon Garcia for violating the automated elections law after he allegedly inserted a new script or computer command in the Commission on Elections (Comelec) transparency server the night of the elections.

In a news conference at Marcos’s campaign headquarters in Mandaluyong City, the senator’s campaign manager, ABAKADA party-list Rep. Jonathan Dela Cruz, said they will file a complaint for violation of Republic Act 9369 or the Automated Election System Law against Garcia.

Dela Cruz said the complaint will be filed with the Comelec on Friday afternoon.

Dela Cruz said this is to show that they're  “serious” in finding out the truth behind the Smartmatic’s introduction of new script in the Comelec’s server, which might have affected the counting of votes.

“Ang pinag uusapan natin dito ay katotohanan. Gusto natin malaman ano ba talaga ang nangyari para buo ang loob ng taong bayan na tanggapin ang resulta ng eleksyon,” Dela Cruz said.

In a press statement, Marcos slammed Smartmatic over the cancellation of the hearing of the Joint Congressional Oversight Committee on the Automated Election System set on Thursday.

The hearing was cancelled after Smartmatic, the systems provider of Comelec, sent a last minute notice that their officials cannot attend the proceedings.

“With the hearing intending to clarify the alteration of the script in the transparency server, which impacts significantly on the sanctity and integrity of the electoral system, Smartmatic officials owe the public a clearer explanation, rather than a cursory excuse, why they can’t participate,” Marcos said.

“Smartmatic has been quick to claim that such change was merely cosmetic and did not in any way alter the results of the elections. If that is so, we expect them to be the ones eager to take advantage of the opportunity which the hearing is providing  to settle the issue,” he added.

Smartmatic and Comelec have earlier stated that the script of the transparency server was tweaked only to correct the “?” character into “ñ “ character in the names of some candidates.

Both Comelec and Smartmatic claimed that the change of the script did not affect the transmission of vote results.

Marcos’ camp, however, had been claiming that it was after the introduction of the new script that votes for the senator stopped coming in and his lead of about one million votes over his closest rival Camarines Sur Rep. Leni Robredo began to diminish.

Robredo took the lead over Marcos past 3 a.m. on May 10.

Robredo continue to lead by more or less 200,000 votes as of Wednesday evening, May 18  based on the Comelec's partial, unofficial tally.

Meanwhile, lawyer Jose Amorado, head of Marcos’ quick count team, said that aside from earlier demanding an audit of the Comelec’s central server and transparency servers, their camp will also file another letter of request to the poll body on Friday to also examine the USB devices, some vote counting machines (VCMs) and compact flash cards used during the elections.

“This is for us to be able to explain and to see how there were so many undervotes, which is critical to the counts of votes for the vice presidential positions,” Amorado said.

Amorado said their camp have observed a "highly irregular" number of undervotes in the vice presidential race.

Amorado defined undervoting as an instance when a voter did not select any candidate for a particular post.

Amorado said that based on the certificates of canvass (COCs) that they have internally tallied, there were a total of 3,326,640 instances of undervotes for the vice presidential post.

Amorado said this number was irregular and “suspicious” considering the high percentage of voter turnout as compared to the 2010 and 2013 elections. — APG, GMA News