The camp of Vice President Leni Robredo on Monday challenged former senator Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to use the picture images of the ballots to determine the true results of the May 2016 vice presidential elections.
“It now appears that Marcos is so afraid to know the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, since the affirmation by the Comelec of the use of the 25-percent threshold exposed the falsity of his previous claim that the Commission on Elections did not use the said threshold in the 2016 elections,” Robredo’s lawyer Romulo Macalintal said.
“Thus, if Marcos is true to his statement that he wants to expedite the resolution of his protest and to prove that we are not delaying these proceedings, we challenge Marcos to use the picture images of the ballots to determine the true results of the election,” he added.
The use of ballot images is the most expeditious way of resolving an election protest in an automated poll, he said.
“This is but consistent with the rules that in case of discrepancy between the physical count of the ballots, the results of the count of ballot images shall prevail,” he stressed.
When Comelec affirmed before the Supreme Court sitting as the Presidential Electoral Tribunal that the “shading threshold of 25 percent” was used in the 2016 elections, and not 50 percent as erroneously argued by Marcos, he immediately accused Comelec of being a “co-conspirator in the alleged electoral fraud committed by the camp of Maria Leonor ‘Leni’ G. Robredo to secure her vice presidency win in the 2016 national elections,” Macalintal said.
“We cannot resist the urge of replying to said media statement, thus, in self defense, we vehemently deny such a baseless and frivolous accusation coming as it does from an election loser who cannot accept defeat in good grace, which epitomizes what political pundits say in jest that ‘in the Philippines, there are only two types of candidate – the winner and the one who claims he was cheated.’”
Vic Rodriguez, Marcos’ spokesperson, said their election protest was meant to “question Comelec’s misconduct in the election and its false canvassing and manipulation of the transmission of the election results.”
According to Macalintal, such only showed how Marcos could be “consistently inconsistent.”
“We respect it as we have exactly where we wanted it to be — the manual recount and judicial revision of ballots since, as his lawyer claimed, the ballots are the best evidence in an election protest,” he said.