By Moira Encina
Eagle News Service
The camp of Vice President Leni Robredo has appealed the Presidential Electoral Tribunal’s decision to use the 50 percent threshold in the manual recount of 2016 vice presidential votes in connection with former Senator Bongbong Marcos’ electoral protest.
Robredo said in her April 18 urgent motion for reconsideration that the PET’s resolution dated April 10 “should be reversed and set aside” as the tribunal was “aware” of the 25 percent threshold percentage used by the Commission on Elections for the May 2010 national elections, contrary to what it said in its resolution.
For this, she said the Comelec wrote a Sept. 6, 2016 letter that supposedly informed the PET of such an application during the 2016 and national and local elections.
She said the tribunal also adopted its Revisor’s Guide for the Revision of Ballots under the Automated Election System, which supposedly enforced the application of such.
As for the PET’s ruling that her claim of a “systematic reduction of her votes” was “without basis,” Robredo said the “numbers will confirm her position.”
According to Robredo, based on the election returns in the municipality of Balatan, Barangay Laganac, clustered precinct No. 16, she received 358 votes as opposed to Marcos’ 17.
When the 50 percent threshold was applied though, she said the results were 346 votes for her, and 17 votes for Marcos.
“Or in simple terms, the votes for protestee Robredo was decreased by 12 votes, while the votes for protestant (Marcos) was maintained,” she said.
She said these 12 “valid votes” that were “considered as stray during the physical count” have to be “claim(ed)” by her.
She said the application of the 50 percent threshold percentage results in voters “being disenfranchised,” and “does not achieve the objective” of the PET, which is to “verify the physical count of the ballots.”
“At the risk of belaboring the point, the physical count is now running inconsistent with the results based on the election returns, statement of votes by precinct, ballot images and the voter’s verifiable audit paper trail. This misleads the Honorable Tribunal into believing that the (vote-counting machines) failed to accurately read and count the ballots,” she said.
Robredo was declared the winner of the vice presidential race in 2016 after she supposedly obtained at least 200,000 votes more than Marcos.
An initial recount of ballots from Camarines Sur, Negros Oriental and Iloilo is ongoing.
