Is Zubiri boycotting own poll counter-protest?

IT IS becoming increasingly clear that there was massive cheating during the 2004 and 2007 elections and that a number of elective public officials should not be in the positions they are now occupying while others who supposedly lost in the elections should be occupying those positions instead. Circumstantial evidence point to that. In the results of the senatorial elections in Maguindanao, Luis “Chavit” Singson, who is from Ilocos Sur, placed first while several opposition candidates got zero votes. A Muslim opposition candidate lost in that Muslim province. Then when it became clear that Singson wouldn’t win anyway because his losses in other provinces were massive, the results changed. Miguel Zubiri became No. 1 in Maguindanao, the province of the Ampatuans. But that at least is more believable because he comes from Mindanao.

But now actors in the cheating are coming out and singing like canaries. Zaldy Ampatuan, the former ARMM governor, and Lintang Bedol, the former Comelec regional director, have confessed that they were instructed to cheat for Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in 2004. Then a group of policemen confessed that they took election returns from the Batasang Pambansa and changed them with doctored ones. Ronald Llamas, President Aquino’s adviser on political affairs, said that GMA’s phone pal, Virgilio Garcillano, had sent feelers that he would like to testify on the “Hello, Garci” tape. Recently, however, Garcillano held a press conference denying that he did any of those things.

Sen. Loren Legarda, who lost to Noli de Castro in the vice-presidential race, said that the confessions and revelations prove that she was cheated. Opposition senatorial candidate Aquilino Pimentel III, who lost to Zubiri by a few thousand votes, says that he should now be proclaimed the rightful senator by the Senate Electoral Tribunal (SET) but Zubiri is “dribbling the ball” as a dilatory tactic.

Pimentel was one of the three guests at the Kapihan sa Manila at the Diamond Hotel last Monday. The other two were Trade Secretary Gregory Domingo, who talked on foreign investments in the Philippines, and Chairman Felicito Payumo of the Bases Conversion and Development Authority (BCDA), who talked on private-public partnerships in infrastructure projects.
But it was Pimentel’s revelations on developments in the SET that pricked the interest of the journalists at the forum. In the actual recount of the votes in the SET, Pimentel said, he has an insurmountable margin of 257,401 votes over Zubiri. On this basis he should already be proclaimed the winner, he claimed.

Zubiri, however, has filed a counter-protest, demanding a recount of the votes in many precincts which, at the present very slow rate that the SET is working, would drag the case into the next two years of what is left of the senatorial term, leaving Pimentel perhaps a day or a week of the term before he is recognized as the winner.

Proof that Zubiri is delaying the case, Pimentel said, was that he has filed an “extremely urgent manifestation” ordering his revisors “not to report” to the revision proceedings for an indefinite period starting July 10, 2011. In the same manifestation, Zubiri’s lawyer said that he had advised his client of the “consequences” of such action and that his client was well aware of those consequences. In short, Zubiri is boycotting his own counter-protest.

In his reply to Zubiri’s manifestation, Pimentel said that Zubiri cleverly did not specify what his order’s consequences would be. Pimentel said its consequences, intended or not, include:
1. The factual abandonment of his counter-protest. “Zubiri is boycotting his own counter protest,” Pimentel said.
2. Zubiri has seen the futility of pursuing his evidently contrived counter-protest, “a fact that the chair of the tribunal had underscored in a recent dissenting opinion.”
3. He has now realized the adverse political repercussions of doggedly asserting a patently artificial claim.

“Unchallenged,” Pimentel continued, “Zubiri’s act, in effect, removes the control of the Electoral Tribunal over the case at bar. Zubiri’s move superciliously freezes the proceedings for an indefinite period starting July 19, 2011.

“Zubiri wrongly applied the still-being tested principles of cryogenics (by which living tissues are frozen for use or revival at some indefinite future time) to this protest, a political and legal matter that involves a senatorial term of office of only six years, from June 30, 2007 to June 30, 2013, of which roughly four years have already been frittered away by the interminable legal wrangling in these proceedings.

“The Zubiri ploy will unnecessarily delay the final and prompt disposition of Pimentel’s protest and maliciously benefit Zubiri himself as the person unlawfully occupying a contested position.

“Any unclear or nebulous response from the tribunal will trivialize its proceedings as if all this time the parties were engaged in a ‘Comedy of Errors’ that Shakespeare did not write but which was orchestrated by Zubiri himself.

“Moreover, the recent public confessions of Zaldy Ampatuan and Lintang Bedol that the 195,000 votes (in round figures) credited to Zubiri in Maguindanao were fraudulently manufactured should be taken into account by the tribunal.”

Conclusion: “The massive cheating operations in the 2007 elections in Maguindanao led to the fake proclamation of Zubiri as a false senator.”

The SET is composed of nine members—three Supreme Court justices and six senators. Some of the senators are dragging their feet in resolving the case to give Zubiri as much time to stay as senator and give Pimentel as little as possible of what is left of the term. Foul!