PET starts hearing Roxas protest vs Binay

MANILA, Philippines - The Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET) yesterday started hearing the election protest filed by former senator Manuel Roxas II against Vice President Jejomar Binay.

Retired Supreme Court justice Bernardo Pardo presided over the hearing. Binay was present during the hearing “to observe the proceedings,” he said. Roxas sent his lawyers.

The legal counsels of Roxas and Binay met for a preliminary conference to limit the issues to be taken up in the hearings, and the procedures that would expedite the resolution of the protest.

During the two-hour meeting, however, the parties failed to agree on grounds to be used for the hearing.

The legal counsels of Roxas, headed by Joe Nathan Tenefrancia, did not agree to the immediate retrieval of the ballots and instead asked the PET to conduct a comprehensive, system-wide forensic analysis of the equipment and paraphernalia used in the automated elections last May.

Tenefrancia also sought the conduct of random manual audit (RMA) of the votes cast for vice president. Binay won the race by a margin of 727,084 votes over Roxas.

“We would like to ask for the forensic analysis of the Automated Election System, and a random manual audit with a greater sample size and better manner of choosing the precincts... This will expedite the proceedings, so there is no need to bring the ballot boxes,” Tenefrancia said.

Pardo said, however, that only the Commission on Elections (Comelec) has the power to conduct a random manual audit.

Lawyers Felicitas Aquino-Arroyo, who represents Binay, said Roxas is merely going on a “fishing expedition” to gather evidence to build up his case.

“What protestant (Roxas) wants the PET to do now is to do a surgery on a cadaver, to resuscitate a corpse. I imagine their purpose is to disassemble the rules of the PET, to realign the position of the organs to suit their purpose. They don’t have the facts that such [fraud] happened, and asking the PET to do the audit is not allowed by the rules to build their case, which they have failed miserably,” Aquino-Arroyo said.

The lawyer also questioned why Roxas did not identify in his protest the specific precincts where cheating allegedly happened.

Both parties, agreed, however, to summon Comelec commissioners to testify at the hearing.

Roxas’ camp also asked the tribunal to summon Cesar Flores of Smartmatic and former ambassador Henrietta de Villa of poll watchdog Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting.

Pardo said he would submit the discussions in yesterday’s conference to the tribunal. No date has yet been set for the next hearing.

In his electoral protest filed last July 9, Roxas alleged that the election results used for Binay’s proclamation did not reflect actual votes because of what he described as “anomalously high incidence” of null and misread votes in the certificates of canvass in precincts nationwide particularly in his bailiwicks, Regions 6, 7 and Caraga.

Roxas claimed he would have won the elections if the Comelec credited the null votes, a majority of which belong to him.

In his answer, Binay said that in their documentation of the null votes, they found out that the number is lower compared to the number of null votes during the 2004 and 2007 polls.

Binay also argued that the results of the Comelec canvass were affirmed by the results of random manual audit conducted by election watchdogs, which showed a 99.6 percent accuracy rate of the poll results.

Binay had also filed a counter-protest against Roxas, questioning the election results in some 40,000 precincts in Regions 6, 7 and Caraga - the same regions contested by Roxas, alleging illegal ballots were used in these areas.