(Eagle News) — There is no legal nor factual basis to believe that the spat between Commission on Elections (Comelec) Chairman Andres Bautista and his wife, Patricia, could cast doubts on the credibility and integrity of the 2016 polls, an election lawyer said.
In a statement on Thursday, Romulo Macalintal said that while Patricia had alleged her husband had ill-gotten wealth, she never made mention of any act he had committed that had compromised the results of the elections.
Macalintal is the counsel of Vice President Leni Robredo, who won the vice presidency last year by a small margin over Bongbong Marcos.
Earlier, Senators Grace Poe and Tito Sotto had said that the allegations of ill-gotten wealth made by the Comelec chief’s wife against him could cast doubt on the win of candidates who won by a small margin over their closest contenders.
“Patricia never mentioned any alleged ‘commission’ or ‘referral fees’ received by Bautista for purposes of cheating or rigging the said elections in favor of any candidate,” he said in a statement.
He noted that there was a “big difference” between “commissions received to favor a bidder and commissions received to cheat the elections.”
According to Macalintal, even then, Bautista alone or even the entire officials of the Comelec cannot rig the Automated Election System used in 2016 to favor certain candidates or political parties.
He said this may require a conspiracy among other stakeholders such as the Central Bank, which is the official depository of the AES source code; the Comelec regional directors and provincial election supervisors; Smartmatic; and others.
“And this certainly is impossible to happen..,” he said.
Macalintal also noted that the AES used in the 2016 elections was the same one used in the 2010 and 2013 elections, when all electoral protests filed were junked reportedly because there was failure to prove any discrepancy between the results generated by the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines and the results generated by a manual counting of the physical ballots.
“…(Manipulation) did not happen in the 2010, 2013 and 2016 polls wherein not an iota of evidence had been presented to destroy their integrity and credibility,” he said.
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