Roxas-Binay poll protest case remains stalled at PET

MANILA, Philippines - The electoral protest of Interior Secretary Manuel Roxas II against Vice President Jejomar Binay has stalled at the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET).

The PET, composed of 15 justices of the Supreme Court (SC), would have to wait for the conclusion of the elections on May 13 before proceeding with the poll protest of Roxas against Binay, according to insiders.

The tribunal granted last month a request of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to use 75 percent of the ballot boxes that contained votes under protest by Roxas, who narrowly lost to Binay in 2010.

The poll body needs to use the ballot boxes for this year’s elections to save the government more than P160 million.

In a 15-page resolution, the PET had allowed the poll body to reuse 57,255 ballot boxes out of the 76,340 covered by Roxas’ electoral protest against Binay, provided that the Comelec set up adequate guidelines and safeguards for their retrieval and collection.

The PET, chaired by Chief Justice Ma. Lourdes Sereno, has ordered the creation of committees for each municipality where the ballot boxes are to be retrieved.

The tribunal also ordered an inventory for each ballot box and the presence of citizens’ watchdog groups during the transfer of the contents of the boxes.

Comelec would spend only P56 million for the retrieval of the ballot boxes instead of P290 million if the agency would purchase new ballot boxes.

The PET also released last year several poll records covered by the protests between Roxas and Binay for resolution of three cases of local election protest in the 2010 polls.

Justices of the Supreme Court, convening as PET, have granted the request for the use of books of voters and records of votes in Danao City, Samboan in Cebu and Pasacao in Camarines Sur, which were among the poll documents that the tribunal had taken into custody from the Comelec to resolve the protest and counter-protest in the 2010 vice presidential race.

Insiders said the resolution of the Roxas vs. Binay case is far from over. They cited previous electoral protests in presidential and vice presidential contests that took several years before they were resolved.

In his protest filed in July 2010, Roxas alleged that election results used for Binay’s proclamation did not reflect actual votes due to what he described as “anomalously high incidence” of null and misread votes in the certificates of canvass in all precincts nationwide especially in his bailiwicks, Regions 6, 7 and Caraga.

Roxas believes that he should have won the election if only the Comelec counted the null votes, which supposedly largely belong to him and would have made him overtake the final 727,084-vote advantage of Binay.

But Binay, in his answer, said that his camp has documented null votes in the automated polls and found that they were the lowest compared to the 2004 and 2007 polls.