ARBB laments voices of 3 million Filipinos not reflected in canvass

The Aquino-Roxas Bantay Balota (ARBB) today lamented that the voices of almost three million Filipinos nationwide are not reflected in the national canvass for the vice presidential race.

Atty. Joey Tenefrancia of ARBB, who also stands as counsel for Senator Mar Roxas, said these three million Filipinos could possibly be disenfranchised after the Joint Canvassing Committee last night decided against their omnibus motion to ensure a complete and accurate count in the tightly-contested vice presidential race.

The Joint Canvassing Committee on Monday night turned down ARBB’s continuing motions to conduct a random manual audit of these null votes, and to check the electronic returns if these tally with the certificates of canvass (COCs).

Tenefrancia said ARBB respects the Joint Canvassing Committee’s decision, even as it decided against their arguments which are based in law, in jurisprudence and in the committee’s own rules.

He explained that around 2.6 million votes for vice president could have possibly been not counted properly by the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines and were instead registered as “null votes.”

Meanwhile, more than 250,000 votes were excluded from the canvass because of the lowering of thresholds implemented by the Commission on Elections for the transmission of certain provincial COCs to the national server; and because of the erroneous transmission of certain precincts of the final testing and sealing (FTS) mock votes instead of the real votes cast on May 10.

Tenefrancia clarified that ARBB is not saying that all of these almost three million votes will go to Roxas, but that “we want a complete and accurate count, with no Filipino disenfranchised.”

He said ARBB will look into all other options to ensure a complete and accurate count, saying that they will have to study further the option to file a protest before the presidential electoral tribunal.