Noy won 2010 polls fair and square, lawyer says

MANILA, Philippines - There was “no factual nor legal basis” to the claim that President Aquino’s victory in the 2010 presidential polls was due to rigging of the automated voting machines, election lawyer Romulo Macalintal said yesterday.

“Aquino won the said election fair and square. He got 42 percent of the votes cast therein.  He was unanimously proclaimed by Congress in joint session on June 9, 2010,” Macalintal said in a statement.

“His opponents did not contest his election when they all conceded defeat. None of them ever said that they were cheated by PCOS (precinct count optical scan) machines,” he said.

He said information technology (IT) experts who kept on casting doubts on Aquino’s victory “miserably failed to show proof that any of the more than 80,000 PCOS machines was ever hacked or their results compromised.” 

He said all election protests involving local posts were dismissed because no material discrepancy between the PCOS results and the results of the physical re-count of the ballots was uncovered.

Macalintal said the best argument that the PCOS count in 2010 was accurate was the fact that Interior and Local Government Secretary Manuel Roxas II has not been actively pursuing his election protest against Vice President Jejomar Binay that he filed in July 2010 with the Supreme Court (SC).

Had there been massive PCOS fraud proven in any of the election protests involving the local elections, Roxas would certainly have demanded the immediate delivery of relevant ballot boxes to the SC for recount, he said.

Roxas’ protest has been lying idle in the SC for years as not a single ballot box has been brought to the high tribunal for ballot recount, he said.

“Thus, I have been challenging these IT ‘experts’ to show at least one, yes, even just one, ballot of the more than 37 million ballots cast in the 2010 or 2013 polls where the vote cast by a voter for, say, Candidate A was credited by the PCOS to Candidate B,” Macalintal said.

He said his challenge was never answered and all the IT experts could come up were alleged results of some recount conducted by trial courts where they claimed the PCOS results did not tally with the physical count of the ballots in one or two precincts.

“But these alleged ‘discrepancies’ were not due to PCOS fraud but were man-made fraud or tampering of the original ballots by some election shenanigans who were out to discredit the integrity of the PCOS count,” Macalintal said.

He made it clear, however, he was not defending the PCOS machines or Smartmatic, the firm that brought the equipment to the country.