No evidence of cheating in 2007 Pampanga gubernatorial polls

No evidence of cheating was found in the 2007 Pampanga gubernatorial elections, just a misappreciation of the ballots, the Commission on Elections said, a day after it unseated governor Ed Panlilio. "Although both parties accuse the other of cheating, no evidence whatsoever was introduced, we did not deal with the issue of cheating," said Comelec Commissioner Nicodemo Ferrer, who presided over the second division that promulgated the Panlilio case. On Thursday, the poll body unseated Panlilio after it found out that his rival, former provincial board member Lilia Pineda, won in the 2007 elections with 190,729 votes against Panlilio's 188,718 votes, a margin of 2,011. In 2007, Panlilio was declared the governor of Pampanga after beating Pineda by 1,147 votes. The former board member accused the winning politician-priest of cheating and initiated recount proceedings against him with the Comelec. No cheating? Ferrer said that with a proper appreciation of the ballots, some of those that were initially declared invalid were considered valid and vice versa. He said that some wrote only the nickname of the candidate while some placed the name on the wrong space. "We do not just ignore the ballot because it was not well written," he said. Besides finding ballots that contained the same handwriting, they also found ballots that had different handwriting, Ferrer added. They had seen "marked ballots," or those that had symbols or names or similar markings on them. Some contained words like "star" or "pacman" written on several ballots, the poll official said. He explained that this was probably a way for a poll watcher to know whether a voter voted for a specific candidate during the counting of the votes, which is done by reading aloud each vote on a ballot. But Ferrer insisted that there wasn't necessarily cheating from either side. "We dont know what really happened (but) if there is cheating, I'm very sure the candidates did not know," he said. "We dont know... it can go either way, you cannot really say," he said. - GMANews.TV