The Supreme Court (SC), sitting as the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET), will start today (Monday) the recount of votes sought by former Sen. Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. who claimed that he lost the 2016 vice presidential race due to “massive cheating.”
The recount will start at 8:30 a.m.
at the gymnasium at the fifth floor of the SC-Court of Appeals Building in Padre Faura, Manila.
Lawyer Jose Lemuel Arenas, PET ad hoc committee member, described the revision as the process of verifying of the ballots, to recount the votes of the parties and to record the objections or claims of the parties objected to or claimed by the parties.
The revision will be conducted from Monday to Friday until 4:30 p.m. and will cover three pilot provinces—Camarines Sur, Iloilo and Negros Oriental—with a total of 5,418 clustered precincts.
The said provinces were chosen by Marcos as the best provinces where he could prove the irregularities he cited in his poll protest.
Arenas said the time limit per ballot box with less than 300 votes will be 5.5 hours, while for 300 to 700 votes will be 8.25 hours, and for more than 700 votes will be 11 hours.
The tribunal is expecting some 213 personnel to come in per day during the recount.
These include 60 employees of the tribunal, psychometricians, lawyers and representatives of both parties, and the revisors.
The revisors are part of the tribunal’s committee tasked to examine the contested ballots.
Once the recount on the first 1,400 ballot boxes is done, the PET will receive the other ballot boxes from Camarines Sur, Iloilo and Negros Oriental.
Members of the Philippine National Police, Philippine Coast Guard, Police Security Protection Group and PET guards will secure the recount venue on a round-the-clock basis.
Marcos filed the protest on June 29, 2016, claiming that the camp of Vice President Maria Leonor G. Robredo cheated in the automated polls in May that year.
In his protest, Marcos contested the results from 132,446 precincts in 39,221 clusters, covering 27 provinces and cities.
Robredo won the vice presidential race in the May 2016 polls, with 14,418,817 votes or 263,473 more than Marcos’s 14,155,344 votes.
Robredo and her legal team will attend the multisectoral mass organized by the Kaya Natin! Movement for Good Governance prior to the start of the recount.