Court nixes poll protest, upholds Mabolo results

Municipal Trial Court in Cities Judge Anatalio Necesario dismissed the election protest of losing barangay captain candidate Daniel Francis Arguedo, and declared Mabolo barangay captain Reynaldo Ompoc as the duly elected official in the last October 29 barangay polls.

In a 15-page decision, Necesario said that the court can “no longer disturb the proclamation of Ompoc as duly elected barangay captain of Mabolo by the barangay board of canvassers.”

 “After the revision, recount and the appreciation of all the contested ballots, the total votes obtained by Ompoc is 4,868 as against Arguedo,” the court said.  Arguedo only got 4,264 votes.

Arguedo however argued that he could have garnered instead a huge margin of votes if all the stray votes were duly appreciated and counted in his favor.

Arguedo also accused the board of election tellers of massive fraud and evident favor, particularly in the discrepancy of the total number of voters who actually voted.

The court however said the swelling on the number of votes for both candidates can be attributed to, during the revision and recount by the revision committee, “some inclusions of votes added to their votes” based on “the application of the principle of the neighborhood rule and other legal principles in the appreciation of ballots.”

Besides, there was no complaint filed by anyone against any member of the board of election tellers or any person for fraudulent electoral practices or violation of election laws, the court said.

The allegations that only two or more persons wrote on the ballots were “doubly preposterous and quite absurd ... because it entails so much creative talent for one to be able to create numerous and considerably different handwritings yet careful and meticulous enough to disguise himself and to cleverly conceal his identity,” said the court.

The court further rejected Arguedo’s objections against the “marked ballots” because these only contained lines, crosses, minor erasures, stain and inconsequential figures written in the spaces allocated for the names of councilmen.

“These are not considered markings to identify the voters but rather... more explicitly the intentions of the voters from further voting additional barangay kagawads other than what they had specifically written which shall not invalidate the ballots,” the court said.

Ompoc, after the court’s decision, offered reconciliation with Arguedo and his camp.

“Ako wa koy problema kun magkauli mi kang Arguedo anyway kani politika ra man ni ug pwede ra magkauli ang among maayong kabubut-on,” he said.  — Ramil V. Ayuman/RAE