SC urged to resolve party-list disqualification cases

THE Commission on Elections (Comelec) on Sunday called on the Supreme Court to finally decide on the petitions of disqualified party-list groups given the poll body’s tight schedule in preparation for the May 13 elections.

“If they decide on it already, we will not be second-guessing anymore if they should be included in our preparations or not, especially in the printing of ballots,” said Comelec Commissioner Rene Sarmiento.

He said the poll body had already sent word to the High Court regarding the timeline of the Comelec, particularly on the configuration of the machines next week and the printing of official ballots later this January.

The Comelec had already approved the participation of 84 party-list organizations, including 58 groups already with existing accreditation and 26 new applicants as party-lists.

On the other hand, 52 of the 194 party-list groups that were already disqualified by the Comelec have managed to secure status quo ante orders (SQAs) from the High Tribunal.

This resulted in the participation of 136 party-lists in the first party-list raffle for the placing in the official ballots last Friday.

But the historic event was stained by the inclusion of 13 groups that should not have been included in the raffle, which developed after the Comelec junked the traditional alphabetical listing that they have been using since 1998.

The seven-man en banc will resolve the problem in a special meeting on Monday as Sarmiento opened the option of re-doing the entire raffle.

He said the error took place after the Comelec was not able to distinguish which groups are qualified for the raffle based on the SC resolution on SQAs.

“Our resolution says that those new applicants, even if they are able to get SQAs from the SC, if they do not get a mandatory injunction, we will not include them (in the raffle). The problem is, in reading the resolution of the SC, they were not able to distinguish which are new applicants and which are existing that’s why they were mistakenly included in the raffle,” said Sarmiento. (HDT/Sunnex)