DEMOCRACY WATCH: DON’T CHANGE THE RULES, JUST FINISH COUNTING VP VOTES
In a democracy, every voter has the right to vote freely and that his vote be counted accurately.
The ruling of the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET) in applying the 50% shading threshold for the Vice Presidential electoral protest would result to the disenfranchisement of voters.
With a higher minimum shading threshold, the vote recount would certainly yield to a lower vote count not only for Vice President Robredo or former Senator Marcos, but for all the positions that we have elected.
The ruling would grossly violate the right of all voters during the 2016 as this would mean invalidating their votes which has been duly counted and canvassed when the 25% shading threshold was set and officially sanctioned in the COMELEC en banc resolution issued on September 2016.
Democracy Watch believes that the ballots subject of the electoral protest should be counted using the same minimum standards during the 2016 elections. The true will of the Filipino electorate cannot be fully ascertained if the Presidential Electoral Tribunal in the ongoing electoral protest will deviate from the standards by which the ballots were appreciated by the vote counting machines.
The random manual audit by the COMELEC, and duly concurred by the National Movement for Free Elections and the Philippine Statistics Authority, revealed that the vote counting machines had a near perfect accuracy rate of 99.9023%.
We cannot change the rules of set by COMELEC, an independent constitutional body mandated to enforce all laws and regulations relative to the conduct of elections, just because someone who lost is raising all sorts of baseless accusations of cheating.
Fairness would dictate that a review of the votes being questioned should be made on the same set of rules and standards implemented during the 2016 National Elections. Changing the rules makes no sense and even insinuates that the votes received by all elected officials, from the President to local officials, specially those closely contested positions should be recounted. All this does is to add another propaganda sound bite to claim there was cheating in the VP race.
Just finish counting the votes and get this over with.