Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Senator inhibits from Senate electoral court proceedings
SENATE Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel Jr. on Tuesday said he will not participate in the hearings of the Senate Electoral Tribunal (SET) on the electoral protest filed by his son, Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel III.
The young Pimentel, who ran under the Genuine Opposition (GO) in the May 14 elections, in contesting the proclamation of Team Unity candidate Juan Miguel Zubiri as the 12th winner in the senatorial race, claiming that it was based on alleged fraudulent votes.
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Senator Pimentel, who is a member of the SET, stressed that he will only inhibit himself from the hearings on his son’s protest so as not to influence the result of the proceedings.
Based on the resolution of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) sitting as the National Board of Canvassers (NBOC), Zubiri garnered 11,004,099 votes as against Koko’s 10,984,807 votes, giving Zubiri a presumptive lead of 19,292 votes over Koko.
The young Pimentel said he was overtaken by Zubiri because his rival’s votes in 44 municipalities in Mindanao were padded.
Koko is seeking a recount of votes from 2,658 precincts involving a total of 391,081 votes.
“Let us open the ballot boxes and have a recount to determine whether that is true. And since Zubiri has been denying the allegation that he won because of the fraudulent votes from Maguindanao, then he should not object to the recount,” said Pimentel in his protest.
Koko will be required to shoulder the cost of retrieving and recounting the votes at P500 per ballot box. Since the protest covers 2,658 ballot boxes, the cost will be about P1.3 million.
Pimentel said he is confident that the protest will not drag on for a long time because it only covers votes from areas equivalent to the size of Caloocan City or half of Bulacan.
He said it may take from one to two months to retrieve all the ballot boxes involved and another four to six months to undertake the revision or recount of the ballots. (CPB/Sunnex)
For more Philippine news, visit Sun.Star Bacolod. (August 8, 2007 issue)
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