Tolentino files poll protest vs De Lima

MANILA, Philippines - An election protest filed recently against Sen. Leila de Lima by former Metropolitan Manila Development Authority chairman Francis Tolentino, who placed 13th in the May senatorial race, was brought before the Senate Electoral Tribunal (SET) yesterday.

The SET, composed of three Supreme Court justices and six senators, heard the case in a closed-door conference in the SC.

Tolentino, whose votes were 1.3 million less than De Lima’s, asked the tribunal to unseat the senator for allegedly committing poll fraud.

He said De Lima cheated in the automated polls by supposedly manipulating the electronic transmission of the vote results.

“It (cheating) was with the electronic transmission. There probably was double transmission,” he said.

“If you saw the results, the margin of votes between the first place to the 12th place was only about 80,000 votes. But when it came to the 13th place, the margin became so big,” he added.

Tolentino likened his case to that of former senator Ferdinand Marcos Jr., who lost in the vice presidential race to Leni Robredo and also filed a poll protest.

The former MMDA chief cited documents and witnesses gathered by his camp to prove his case.

De Lima had submitted her reply to Tolentino’s protest wherein she denied the charges, saying she did not even have resources to fund her campaign.

Tolentino did not believe De Lima’s reply, saying: “That’s not true because she reportedly had drug money that fueled her campaign. There should really be no narco-money involved in elections.”

Apart from De Lima’s ouster, Tolentino was hoping his protest would lead to reforms in the automated polls.

“We are hoping that the counting of votes is done manually in the precincts and only the transmission of results is automated so the people would really see that their votes are counted,” he said.

After the first hearing on the protest, the SET, chaired by Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio, ordered Tolentino to submit a reply to De Lima’s answer within five days.

In May, Tolentino filed a petition with the SC seeking to stop the proclamation of the bottom three winners in the senatorial race.?The high tribunal dismissed his petition for being moot and academic as De Lima and the other winning senators had already been proclaimed.

Tolentino had wanted the high court to order the Commission on Elections to open the automated election system to forensic audit and investigation based on what he described as an “unauthorized manipulation” made by system provider Smartmatic.

He said he expected to win in the senatorial elections based on survey results and the endorsement of the Iglesia ni Cristo.