THE Supreme Court (SC) is set to discuss the election protest filed by Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. against Vice President Leni Robredo in its en banc session on Tuesday.
The SC, acting as the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET), will include Marcos' poll protest questioning his loss in the May 9 vice presidential race in its agenda on the next en banc meeting.
The SC justices led by SC chief justice Maria Lourdes Sereno are expected to discuss and deliberate the case as its initial action to Marcos' case.
In a 1200-page petition filed last Wednesday, Marcos asked the PET to set aside the oath taking of then Vice President-elect and now Vice president Robredo as she took oath of office as vice president last June 30.
Marcos also wanted the Court to declare him as the winning vice president of the May 9 elections.
Attached in Marcos' petition were 20,000 pages of affidavits, Certificates of Canvass, and other supporting documents that will he said will prove his claims of massive cheating in the recently concluded polls.
According to Atty. George Garcia, Marcos' legal counsel, the cheating was executed in three ways.
First was through the irregularity in the Automated Election System (AES); second is the traditional way of cheating, particularly vote buying, preshading of the ballots, and failure of elections; third was the tweaking of the script in one of the Comelec transparency servers by the Smartmatic. All these, according to Garcia, have affected the results of the votes.
Marcos asked the PET to reopen the ballot boxes in 36,465 clustered precincts including those in Cebu, Leyte, Negros Occidental, Negros Oriental, Samar, Isabela, Pangasinan, Zamboanga and Bukidnon, all considered as Marcos' "bailiwick."
Marcos also requested the Court to nullify the vote results in Lanao del Sur, Maguindanao, and Basilan, as well as a recount in 22 provinces and 5 highly-urbanized cities in the country.
Marcos, an independent candidate, was defeated by her closest rival Liberal Party bet Robredo by only 263,473 votes. Robredo obtained 14,418,817 votes while Marcos got 14,155,344.
The case, which was raffled last Thursday, went to the last appointee of former President Benigno Aquino III, SC Associate Justice Alfredo Benjamin Caguioa. (Sunnex)