It should have been over a long time ago.
Opposition Senator Leila de Lima said this on Monday as she questioned the “continuing saga” on the election protest filed by former senator Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. against Vice President Leni Robredo.
De Lima noted that instead of dismissing Marcos’ election protest, the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET) chose to continue to “encourage Marcos’ pipe dreams of sleeping once again in his childhood bedroom in Malacañang” when the Supreme Court justices decided to entertain another cause of action that is not even covered by an election protest and that is, the wholesale nullification of the elections in certain provinces of Mindanao during the May 2016 polls.
“This is unprecedented. In election law, there is no cause of action for nullification of elections independent of a declaration of a failure of elections. This is because the latter always entails the holding of special elections. No one, but no one, can simply ask for the absolute nullification of election results without the concomitant holding of special elections,” said De Lima, a former election lawyer.
“To do otherwise, i.e., nullify election results without special elections, means the disenfranchisement of entire voting populations. In this case, that means the voting population of three Mindanao provinces,” she added.
“This is hornbook election law doctrine. Decades of jurisprudence since the turn of the 20th century has consistently held that no court can throw away election results and declare a protestant the winner without replacing the nullified election results with valid returns from a new special election held for that purpose,” she further explained.
De Lima said it is, therefore, “quite mystifying” why the Court would depart from decades of settled jurisprudence and entertain a purely question of law that is not even novel in any manner whatsoever.”
“Why would they even ask the Comelec (Commission on Elections) and the OSG (Office of the Solicitor General) to comment on a question of law that the Supreme Court itself has already settled in countless cases?” she asked.
Earlier, the SC, sitting as the PET, required the Comelec and OSG to comment on the pending issues in the electoral protest Marcos had filed against Robredo.
The PET specifically ordered Comelec to comment on whether petitions for failure of elections were filed in the provinces of Lanao del Sur, Basilan and Maguindanao. The three provinces were where Marcos supposedly had sought to annul the elections due to alleged terrorism, intimidation, harassment of voters and pre-shading of ballots.
Likewise, both the poll body and the OSG were asked to report if the PET is constitutionally empowered to declare the annulment of elections even without special elections and declare the failure of elections and order the conduct of special elections.
De Lima said she can only wonder why the SC is suddenly mulling how it can disregard the ballots in the three Mindanao provinces without holding special elections to pursue the possibility of proclaiming Marcos as the winning vice president.
“Huwag naman sana yan ang balak nila (I hope that is not their plan). The nullification of elections is not even the office of an election protest. It is the consequence of a declaration of a failure of elections, which is an entirely different cause of action from an election protest,” she stressed.
“In short, the PET does not even have original jurisdiction over failure of elections as a Special Action in election law. Only the Comelec has. Marcos cannot raise this with the PET. He should have raised it with the Comelec in 2016, not with the Comelec now of 2020, and definitely not with the PET,” she pointed out.
“Huwag naman sana nilang palitan ang deka-dekadang doktrina ng batas para lamang masunod ang kapritso ng iilang nasa kapangyarihan (I hope they don’t change the law’s decade-old doctrine just to agree to the whims of some people in power),” the opposition lawmaker further said.