Comelec stops ouster of Tawi-Tawi mayor

MANILA, Philippines - The second division of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) has issued a temporary restraining order (TRO), stopping a court in Bongao, Tawi-Tawi from ousting Simunul Mayor Nazif Abdurahman.

In a one-page order, the Comelec’s second division directed Bongao, Tawi-Tawi Regional Trial Court Branch 5 Judge Peter Eisma, “to cease and desist” from enforcing his April 2 special order for the next 60 days.

The issuance of the TRO stemmed from a petition for certiorari filed by Abdurahman’s lawyer Romulo Macalintal with the Comelec wherein he questioned Eisma’s decision to invalidate the 1,022 votes the mayor got in the 2010 polls.

Macalintal said Eisma had “committed grave abuse of discretion and horrible mistakes in ruling that the 1,022 ballots of Abdurahman cast in the first nationwide automated polls were shaded by one person judging from the strokes and direction of shading.” 

“If this kind of decision in an election protest involving automated ballots is sustained, then it would be very easy now to cheat in an automated election.  All that is needed for the loser is to file an election protest and get a cooperative judge who will now have the authority to rule that such ballots were ‘shaded by?one person’ following the Eisma principles,” he noted.