THE Supreme Court, sitting as Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET), has upheld its decision to adopt the 50 percent threshold in determining the validity of votes in the ongoing manual recount of ballots in the protest filed by former Senator Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos against Vice President Leni Robredo.
However, in a 23-page decision en banc decision, the PET decided to abandon the use of numerical threshold in segregating questionable votes and instead directed revisors to refer to elections returns (ERs).
The ER is a document in electronic and printed form directly produced by the vote counting machine showing the date of the election, the province, municipality and the precincnt in which it was held, and the votes in figures for each candidate in a clustered precinct where the said VCM was utilized.
In separate developments, both the Robredo and Marcos camps claimed they won this round of the epic electoral battle, with the vice president’s lawyer Romy Macalintal calling a press conference in Quezon City; and the former senator’s lawyer Dick Rodriguez saying in a radio interview he was aghast that their rivals can “speak volumes of lies” in twisting the implication of the latest PET issuance.