 |
| Photo from: theconservativetreehouse |
Meanwhile, the electoral battle has shifted to the vice
presidency. In that race, Independent vice presidential candidate Sen.
Ferdinand (Bongbong) Marcos, Jr. had been leading LP’s Leni Robredo all day of
Monday by as much as close to a million votes. All internal exit polls showed
the same results; even the notorious Social Weather Stations, which managed to
fudge the exit poll in 2004, showed Marcos ahead with 34.9 percent against
Robredo’s 32.5 percent.
But by 4 a.m. of Tuesday, with some 4 million votes of the
reported turnout unaccounted for, Robredo suddenly overtook Marcos. At press
time Tuesday, she had 13,740,668 votes against Marcos’s 13,551,082 votes.
The tally is unofficial, and does not identify the specific
sources of the votes. The Marcos camp has called for a stop to the unofficial
quick count, and asked those reporting the votes to specifically identify the
places they are coming from. This is a valid request since the Official Count has
already begun, but someone at the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible
Voting insists on continuing with the unofficial count. Sounds fishy to a lot
of people.
Sources at the Duterte camp suggest that Robredo’s votes
have been padded to a significant extent at this point, and that Sen. Francis
Escudero, who has been trailing Bongbong and Leni from the very start, may have
agreed to transfer some of his votes to Robredo. This speculation appears to
find support in one so-called “honest mistake” where 36,422 votes were removed
from Escudero and 35,668 votes added to Robredo in the unofficial count. This
was reported by GMA-7 and CNN. GMA said it committed a mistake, but the fact
that another network carried the same “mistake” meant that the “error” occurred
at the source—the Comelec—rather than at the reporting outlets.
Rear-guard action
What is happening in this race appears to confirm everything
that has been reported about Aquino’s plan to prevent Marcos from becoming the
Vice President. In a meeting before the election, LP top dogs and Aquino’s
principal advisers were reported to have agreed that Roxas had lost the fight,
and that their best shot would be to fight rear guard action in the vice
presidential race. Everything had to be done to make Robredo the Vice President
so she could succeed Duterte after he is removed by impeachment.
This meant that some 3 million “floating ballots” allegedly
reserved for Roxas’ special operations, if Duterte’s edge was smaller than 3
million, should be diverted to Robredo so she could prevail over Bongbong as a
first step in ousting Duterte after June 30. This was the same plan the Roxas
camp had in 2010 when Mar Roxas slid down to the position of vice presidential
candidate. His advisers were confident that the LP could impeach and remove
PNoy after a few months, and put his VP in office, but some of PNoy’s relatives
got wind of it, and supported Jojo Binay instead.
This also explains the reported unprecedented turnout of 81
percent. The usual average is 65 percent. By inflating the “number of voters
who voted,” it becomes easier to play around with the votes of the candidates.
This is an old malpractice, which some operatives tried to inflict on the 1995
midterm elections, purposely to shut me out and a few others from the
senatorial race. Luckily, I got wind of it and was able to stop it. - Read full article on Francisco S. Tatad, Manila Times
