The Supreme Court, acting as the Presidential Electoral Tribunal, on Tuesday again deferred action on the election protest filed by former Senator Ferdinand Marcos Jr. against Vice President Leni Robredo.
“The PET did not take any action on the vice presidential election protest case during the tribunal’s session today,” high court spokesman SC Brian Keith Hosaka said.
“The case remains pending and is still being deliberated by the members of the tribunal.”
Hosaka said the high court reset the deliberations on the poll protest to Oct. 15.
He made his statement even as Robredo’s camp expressed optimism that the high court would dump Marcos’ protest.
Robredo’s spokesman Barry Gutierrez cited Rule 65 of the PET stipulating that the petitioner must have a significant recovery of the votes before the electoral protest could proceed, otherwise the protest could be dismissed.
“It is business as usual for us. We will continue to closely monitor [the case],” Gutierrez said.
The PET on Tuesday was scheduled to tackle the report of Associate Justice Alfredo Benjamin Caguioa, the magistrate in charge of the case, on the recount or revision of the ballots from Marcos’ chosen pilot provinces of Camarines Sur, Iloilo and Negros Oriental.
Caguioa submitted the report on Sept. 9.
Marcos has been contesting Robredo’s victory in the last vice presidential elections for the last three years. Robredo had defeated him in 2016 by a margin of 263,473 votes, a win that he claims was a product of electoral fraud.
The results of the manual recount in Camarines Sur, Iloilo and Negros Oriental will determine whether or not Marcos’ protest will proceed to the rest of his contested clustered voting precincts.
Marcos seeks the annulment of Robredo’s proclamation as vice president, the conduct of the manual recount of the ballots, and the annulment of the election results for the vice president’s post in Maguindanao, Lanao del Sur and Basilan.
However, Marcos was left with two causes of action when the PET upheld the integrity of the automated election system and dismissed the first cause of action in 2017.
Chief Justice Lucas Bersamin said earlier that the electoral tribunal had to be “very careful” in deciding the case “because the credibility of our processes as well as of the political system here is at stake.”
Bersamin and Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio will retire on Oct. 18 and on Oct. 26, respectively.
Bersamin said the PET’s decision on the electoral protest filed by Marcos against Robredo may not happen before his retirement on Oct. 18.
He said there were still many issues in the case that had yet to be resolved. With Rio N. Araja
