Philippines: BALLOT BOXES CONTAINING DISPUTED VOTES RETRIEVED FOR KOKO PIMENTEL’S ELECTORAL PROTEST

BALLOT BOXES CONTAINING DISPUTED VOTES RETRIEVED FOR KOKO PIMENTEL’S ELECTORAL PROTEST

All the ballot boxes needed for the electoral protest
of lawyer Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel III against Sen.
Juan Miguel Zubiri have already been retrieved.

This was revealed by Minority Leader Aquilino “Nene”
Q. Pimentel, Jr. (PDP-Laban) in the course of the
Senate floor deliberation on the proposed budget of
the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) for
fiscal year 2008.

The retrieval of the ballot boxes from 22 towns in
Maguindanao, seven towns in Lanao del Norte, four
towns in Lanao del Sur and one town in Shariff
Kabunsuan in the ARMM and their turnover to the Senate
Electoral Tribunal (SET) will pave the way for the
recount of the votes.

“The ballot boxes have been retrieved without
incident. This is a good sign,” Pimentel said.

“At the very least, we are allowing the law to prevail
and take its course, as it were, rather than use force
or violence to frustrate the very ends of the law.”

He noted that ARMM officials have extended cooperation
to the officials of Senate Electoral Tribunal (SET) in
collecting the ballot boxes.

“ARMM officials have shown signs that they probably
want to get into the bottom of the problem.”

Koko Pimentel claimed that massive fraud in
Maguindanao enabled Zubiri to dislodge him from the
12th slot in the May, 2007 senatorial election.

All the 12 candidates of the Genuine Opposition lost
in Maguindanao, with most of them obtaining zero votes
in the province which even Comelec officials admitted
were “statistically improbable.”

Sen. Pimentel, however, voiced extreme displeasure
over the failure of the Philippine National Police in
the autonomous region to track down and apprehend
Maguindanao election supervisor Lintang Bedol who went
into hiding after the Comelec ordered his arrest to
serve a six-month imprisonment Bedol was found guilty
of contempt for repeatedly failing to show up at the
Comelec hearings on the missing certificates of
canvass from the various towns of the province.

Bedol was believed to have connived with
administration special operators in falsifying the
election to make it appear that Koko Pimentel and
other GO senatorial candidates lost to their Team
Unity opponents in Maguindanao.

Pimentel suspected that Bedol is being hidden by local
politicians identified with the administration to
prevent the poll official from spilling the beans on
the large-scale Maguindanao fraud.

He lamented that despite the grant of autonomy to
predominantly Muslim provinces to enable them to
manage their own affairs and enforce the law
effectively, they have always figured in massive
anomalies in every national elections. He said these
cheating operations were believed perpetrated mostly
by people coming from Manila.

“I am not at all certain that my brothers and sisters
from the ARMM are the ones who are actually and on
their own volition would want to subvert the electoral
process in this country,” Pimentel said.

“What happens is that operators coming from Manila
would go there and induce them to agree to some shady
operations that will alter the actual results of the
elections.”

Pimentel said well-meaning national politicians were
frustrated over the notoriety of the ARMM provinces as
the so-called “cheating capital” of the country that
the late Sen. Raul Roco suggested that elections
should no longer be held in those areas.

“That to my mind, is a solution that would probably
produce more problems than it would intend to solve,”
he said.

But he said the efforts to prosecute and punish
election scam perpetrators have been blocked by
powerful government officials who themselves were
catapulted to their posts through cheating.

“When somebody is elected through fraudulent votes, he
would tend to protect also the people who caused the
fraudulent count so he could be elected. Therefore it
becomes a vicious cycle,” Pimentel said.

He said it is time to put an end to this kind of
anomalies otherwise, the whole electoral process will
be considered a joke which inevitably weakens the
foundations of democracy in the country.
-o0o-

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