A fight worth fighting?

The Presidential Electoral Tribunal’s dismissal of the election protest filed by Senator Loren Legarda on the results of the 2004 vice presidential election came both as a surprise and no-surprise to Legarda and her group.

After spending over P12 million and over three years of her time proving that massive fraud marred the 2004 polls, Legarda’s camp says she clearly felt that she had already done her part. 

Her camp says that on account of her failure to cough up P3.9 million more to fund the recount of ballots from Cebu, Pampanga and Maguindanao and her winning a Senate seat in 2007, Legarda was waiting for the inevitable.

While a loss before the PET was expected, they say that the PET decision still came like a bolt of lightning Friday, its content half expected by Legarda and her battery of lawyers because of the basis for the dismissal. 

In his concurring opinion, Justice Antonio Carpio said “abandonment alone” should have been the ground cited for the dismissal, and not the alleged “lack of evidence” to support Legarda’s case, as stated in the PET decision. Legarda’s group said they agree with Justice Carpio.

Legarda’s camp says that while the assumption of her Senate office after topping the 2007 elections may be treated as “abandonment” of her case, they believe that her case should not have been dismissed for lack of evidence.

 They say that Legarda had produced copies of the election returns (ERs) from the Commission on Election and National Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel) to which the ERs retrieved from Congress were compared.

They noted that curiously, while the Comelec and Namfrel ERs for Taraka and Balindong in Lanao del Sur were identical as all ERs from the same areas should be, the ERs for the two towns from Congress bore entirely different results.

Even Comelec chairman Benjamin Abalos confirmed that the Congress ERs scrutinized during the PET hearings were spurious as many of them lacked security features. Lacs Daligdig, an official of Namfrel in Lanao del Sur, also testified before the PET on how the elections in 2004 were rigged in the area.

Both Abalos and Daligdig authenticated as genuine the Lanao del Sur ERs retrieved from the Comelec and Namfrel, against which the Congress ERs did not match.

This, Legarda’s camp said, was the reason why they could not accept the PET decision that she had allegedly failed to produce evidence to support her case. 

Legarda’s group is now saying that while she may not have the kind of money to see her protest to its fruition, but she had unveiled the tip of the iceberg on what she described as a crime against Filipinos which has no match in the annals of the country’s history.

To the Palace, the dismissal of Legarda’s protest affirmed its alleged legitimacy, on account of Legarda and the late Fernando Poe. Jr., again allegedly, premising their respective protests on the same grounds – that President Arroyo and De Castro benefited from the same cheating undertaken in 2004, in the very same areas.

But as the saying goes, it’s not over until Garci, err the fat lady sings. It will be the people who will eventually judge and say what they believe really happened during the 2004 polls. 

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