Defeated vice-presidential bet Manuel Roxas II asked the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET) to conduct a forensic probe of the May 10 polls and nullify the victory of Vice-President Jejomar Binay who beat him by 700,000 votes. In resolving election protests in the presidential and vice-presidential races, the Supreme Court (SC) acts as the PET. At a preliminary conference on Thursday, Joe Nathan Tenefrancia, lead counsel of Roxas, said the PET should order a random manual edit of an acceptable sample of votes cast during the the country's first automated polls on May 10 this year.
The preliminary conference was presided by hearing commissioner Bernardo Pardo, a former Supreme Court justice and Commission on Elections (Comelec) chairperson. Binay was present at Thursday's preliminary conference while Roxas was not. Through his lawyers, Roxas asked the PET on Thursday to create a forensic team to determine whether there was fraud during the election. Roxas made this request even though the Comelec random manual audit showed that the elections were 99.6 percent accurate. Forensic probe The camp of Roxas asked the court for a forensic probe to determine whether alleged irregularities marred the integrity of the May 10 polls. "It is undisputed that the Automated Election System had a reading, memory, and transmission problem," said Tenefrancia. "We would like to ask for the forensic analysis of the Automated Election System, and a random manual audit with a greater sample size and better manner of choosing the precincts," said the lawyer. He said the forensic analysis and the random manual audit should be done before ballot boxes are brought to the tribunal. "This will expedite the proceedings, so there is no need to bring the ballot boxes," he said. Alleged irregularities Tenefrancia said the alleged irregularities include:
The "anomalous" number of 2.6 million null votes, which could have been for Roxas; The late re-configuration, testing, and sealing of the Compact Flash (CF) cards, which are responsible for the reading of ballots fed to the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS); The Commission on Elections' failure to have an independent group review the source code, which is the human-readable version of the computer programs that ran the PCOS machines; Problems on the reading of the PCOS machines of data or marks on the ballots; Statistical improbabilities and anomalously high incidence of votes that have been nullfied, invalidated, or otherwise disregarded or misread Election protest In his election protest, Roxas also noted the following: in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), 578 election machines reported an average voter turnout of 97.85 percent; in Kalinga, 33 machines reported a province-wide turnout of 98.47 percent; and in the Cordillera Autonomous Region (CAR), 44 machines had a region-wide turnout of 98.54 percent. In 1,147 clustered precincts, he received 10 votes or less, 688 (or 60 percent) of which are from the ARMM. In the 688 ARMM clustered precincts, 328 were from Lanao del Sur and 251 were from Maguindanao. Meanwhile, in 305 clustered precincts, he received less than 1 percent of the votes of the total precinct turnout, and in 204 clustered precincts, he received one or zero vote. Fishing expedition However, Binay's lawyer, Felicitas Aquino-Arroyo, countered Tenefrancia saying the forensic probe and random manual audit were not part of the PET's jurisdiction and were not provided under PET rules. Aquino-Arroyo, wife of Senator Joker Arroyo, claimed that Roxas' camp is only doing a "fishing expedition" to gather evidence to build up its case. She added that it was unfair of Roxas to question the integrity of the system-wide automated elections and Binay's "righteous victory." "What protestant (Roxas) wants... the PET to do now is to do a surgery on a cadaver, to resuscitate a corpse. I imagine their purpose is to disassemble the rules of the PET, to realign the position of the organs to suit their purpose," said Aquino-Arroyo. "They don't have the facts that such [fraud] happened, and asking the PET to do the audit is not allowed by the rules to build their case, which they have failed miserably," she added. Aquino-Arroyo also questioned why Roxas' election protest did not identify the specific precincts where the former senator was allegedly cheated of victory. Who has the jurisdiction? Pardo then grilled Tenefrancia and told him that the Comelec has jurisdiction over the conduct of the random manual audit. "The Comelec should conduct the random manual audit, under Republic Act No. 9369 [Election Automation Law]," said Pardo. The said law states that: "Where the AES is used, there shall be a random manual audit in one precinct per congressional district randomly chosen by the Commission in each province and city. Any difference between the automated and manual count will result in the determination of root cause and initiate a manual count for those precincts affected by the computer or procedural error." The Comelec's technical working group that had conducted the audit in the May 10 polls said the elections were 99.6 percent accurate. –VVP/JV, GMANews.TV 
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