Comelec to review ruling in Atienza poll protest

MANILA, Philippines - The Commission on Elections (Comelec) is set to review a previous ruling dismissing an election protest filed against Manila Mayor Alfredo Lim.

Romulo Macalintal, legal counsel of former Manila mayor Lito Atienza, said the Comelec’s first division has already elevated the case before all the commissioners.

“This election protest will be properly evaluated by the Comelec en banc and eventually decided in (Atienza’s) favor with the recount and revision of ballots from the unrevised 1,221 precincts involving more than 874,700 ballots which could materially affect the alleged 197,000 vote-lead of Lim,” Macalintal said.

Former Manila mayor Lito Atienza earlier sought a reconsideration of the Comelec’s first division ruling dismissing the protest case based on results of the recount of the ballots from 200 clustered precincts out of the 1,441 clustered precincts under question.

In his motion, Atienza claimed the Comelec’s first division committed an error by excluding the 1,221 unrevised clustered precincts from the recount.

Atienza pointed out that the first division itself found out that from the 200 clustered precincts, there were 77 clustered precincts where the physical count of the ballots did not tally with the count generated by the PCOS machines.

“Hence, it means that an average of 385 clustered precincts from the unrevised 1,221precincts could possibly contain such irregularity. With an average of 700 ballots per precinct, these 385 suspect precincts would involve 269,500 ballots which could materially affect the results of the protest,” he said.

Atienza took exception to the first division’s ruling disregarding his claim that 600 ballots in one precinct did not bear the signature of the chairman of the board of election inspectors and in some precincts, the signatures appearing on the ballots did not match or tally with the signatures of either the chairman or members of the BEIs.

He said the first division failed to rule on his argument that “a substantial number of precincts contained votes which exceeded the total number of voters who actually voted.”

Even the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting reported the discrepancies involving two-digit variances for the position of mayor in its random manual count of various precincts in Manila, Atienza said.