The camp of former President Joseph Estrada vowed to disclose evidence of alleged discrepancies in the results of the 2010 presidential race when Congress convenes as the National Board of Canvassers (NBOC) to canvass the votes for president and vice president. In an interview with reporters on Thursday, Estrada's legal counsel George Erwin Garcia said they will ask Congress to not rely solely on the electronically transmitted results when it convenes as the NBOC on May 31. "We will be presenting evidence, documents and people to prove that there were indeed irregularities... which we think will reflect on the credibility of the elections," Garcia said. Only the Senate and the House of Representatives, sitting as the NBOC, can proclaim the winning candidates for president and vice president. On the other hand, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) will be the one to proclaim the winners for the senatorial and party-list races.
Garcia said they are still in the process of consolidating evidence that there were indeed discrepancies in the results of the automated polls. He specifically cited the areas of Masbate and San Juan as problematic. He said that in Masbate, the results of the random manual audit showed that the electronic and manual count did not match. He likewise said that it was suspicious how Estrada only ranked third in San Juan, a known bailiwick of the former president. "
May mga precinct na hindi nagtutugma yung bilang ng balota... ang dami po naming reports na ganyan (There are precincts where the counts do not match, we have many similar reports like that)," Garcia said. To prove these claims, Garcia said they intend to ask Congress to open the Compact Flash (CF) cards in the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines, the ballot boxes, and even conduct their own parallel manual count in some areas. He noted, however, that they were not trying to imply that Estrada should be leading in the presidential race. He said that they just want to make sure that the president who will be proclaimed is the right one. "The president of the Philippines should be the president as determined by the people, not (by) things other than the people," he said.
Not contesting Congress decision Garcia added that Estrada won't even contest whoever is determined by the Congress to be the winner. "He will not make a protest , he will accept whatever the mandate of people will be," he said. He said that they wish to settle everything before June 30, the deadline for the proclamation of the president of the country. "We cannot take the risk of the country in the brink of a problematic scenario, definitely everything will have to be done by June 30, we have to have a president by June 30 at noon," he said. Meanwhile, Garcia also asked the Comelec to refrain from releasing unofficial tallies of the presidential race because it supposedly doesn't have the right to do so. "
Kapag Comelec ang nagsabi, official ang dating sa tao (When Comelec announces it, it seems official to the people)... we do not want to preempt the performance of the function by Congress," he said. "There will be two constitutional bodies which will be presenting two different data,
sino ngayon ang kanilang susundan (who will they believe)?" he added. But he said that counts conducted by non-constitutional bodies like media outfits and election watchdogs are welcome. Unofficial tallies by both the Comelec and other institutions show Senator Benigno Aquino III as the leading presidential candidate, with Estrada, who scored a landslide win in the 1998 polls, a far second this time around .
— RSJ/LBG, GMANews.TV 
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