THE number of votes for the 2016 vice presidential polls are expected to change once the manual recount being conducted by the Supreme Court, acting as Presidential Electoral Tribunal, is over, an election official said Tuesday.
Commission on Elections spokesman James Jimenez said the opposing camps of Vice President Leonor Robredo and former senator Ferdinand Marcos Jr. should not be surprised if the votes they received in 2016 will not be the same as the would-be results of the recount.
“Numbers will change. That would be one of the possible consequences of this move now,” Jimenez said.
The revision of the votes will determine who between Marcos and Robredo actually won the vice presidential race in 2016 elections, he said.
The PET’s supervised revision of ballots or manual recount of votes started on April 2 for the resolution of the election protest filed by Marcos against Robredo. This will be the first recount of votes to be conducted by the PET under the 1987 Constitution.
Jimenez explained that the change will come mainly due to the difference in ballot appreciation between a machine and a human revisor.
“A manual revisor means that a human reading the ballot might interpret it differently. So even without the threshold question, you are already looking at a possible mismatch of the machine results versus the human counted result,” said Jimenez in a television interview.
Add to this, according to Jimenez, is the recent PET decision that reiterated its use of the 50 percent threshold in ballot oval shading instead of 25 percent.
“Speaking in general terms, the machines basically identified an oval with a mark of at least 25 percent as vote [in 2016]. If the machine has been counting at 25 percent during the election and you set it at a higher threshold, then you will really see a dip in the numbers all across the board,” said Jimenez.
The PET earlier denied the motion filed by Robredo’s lawyers to consider ballot ovals shaded by a minimum of 25 percent as valid votes in the ongoing electoral protest ballot recount.
Marcos, the namesake and son of the late strongman Ferdinand Marcos, filed the protest on June 29, 2016, claiming that the camp of Robredo cheated in the automated polls in the May 2016 national polls.
In his protest, Marcos contested the results in a total of 132,446 precincts in 39,221 clustered precincts covering 27 provinces and cities. He sought for a recount in Camarines Sur, Iloilo and Negros Oriental covering a total of 5,418 clustered precincts.
Robredo filed her answer in August 2016 and filed a counter-protest, questioning the results in more than 30,000 polling precincts in several provinces where Marcos won.
She also sought the dismissal of the protest for lack of merit and jurisdiction of PET.
Robredo, who ran under the ruling Liberal Party, the political party of then President Benigno Aquino III, won the vice presidential race with 14,418,817 votes, up by only 263,473 against the votes received by Marcos.
But Marcos declared that the cheating carried out in the May 9, 2016 elections was massive and unprecedented because it has become institutionalized.
The young Marcos said he will present the “true results” of the elections so that he can assume the position that is being warmed up for him.