SC to Comelec, Lim: Answer Atienza protest

The Supreme Court (SC) has ordered the Commission on Elections (Comelec) and Manila Mayor Alfredo Lim to answer a petition of defeated candidate Lito Atienza seeking the reopening of all ballot boxes used in the mayoralty race in 2010 for his poll protest.

In a resolution, the High Court directed the Comelec and Lim to submit their respective comments within 10 days from receipt the notice on Atienza’s petition seeking the re-examination of all 1,441 ballot boxes.

Atienza welcomed the SC order. “Comelec should be the most interested party to ascertain what actually happened in Manila elections. We are dismayed that they refused to open the remaining 1,241 ballot boxes in spite of the obvious and substantial evidences of tampering,” he said.

He questioned why the Comelec had required him to pay for the opening of the entire 1,441 ballot boxes but the poll body had only allowed the opening of the 200 ballot boxes in his protest.

Out of the 200 boxes opened, Atienza said 152 boxes of clustered precincts or 76 percent contained clear signs of various forms of tampering.

“So why stop at 200 when expenses for the 1,441 have been deposited?” he asked.

Atienza, a former Manila mayor, also claimed that there were either more ballots discovered or fewer ballots in the boxes than the actual number of voters who cast their ballots, which should not be the case in an automated system.

He said there were also many ballots that showed the absence of the signature of the Board of Election Inspectors chairman, while many bear the signatures of persons who are not authorized.

Last year, the Comelec’s first division dismissed Atienza’s election protest for lack of merit, saying he failed to prove that the results of the automated elections are inaccurate and riddled with errors, based on “his pinpointed pilot clustered precincts. We find no more need to proceed with the recount of the rest of his protested clustered precincts.”

According to the Comelec, the automated results tallied with the results of the manual count done by election officials in the city. In the manual count, Lim registered an aggregate lead of 42,672 votes in all six districts even if the poll body included the ballots that were rejected by the counting machines used in the elections.

This decision had prompted Atienza to elevate the protest to the SC.