Veteran election lawyer Romulo Macalintal, who is also Vice President Leni Robredo’s lead counsel, said on Tuesday, May 11, that only “luck” will reverse the ruling of the Supreme Court (SC) that junked the electoral protest filed by former Senator Ferdinand Marcos Jr.
In February, the SC, acting as the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET), dismissed unanimously the entire Marcos’ poll protest against Robredo regarding cheating and fraud allegations during the 2016 vice presidential race.
“Mr. Marcos would be the luckiest man in the world if he could reverse the unanimous decision by merely repeating the same issues and arguments already decided by the entire Presidential Electoral Tribunal,” Macalintal said.
Marcos filed a Motion for Reconsideration (MR) on Monday, May 10, asking the PET to reconsider the ruling that junked his electoral protest. He insisted that his third cause of action—to annul votes in Lanao del Sur, Basilan, and Maguindanao—was separate and should not have been dismissed with the two causes of action.
The first two cause of action were the manual recount and judicial revision.
READ: Marcos asks PET to reconsider ruling in favor of VP Robredo
The former senator believes that annulling the votes in the three Mindanao provinces would benefit him because he only lost by a slim margin of 263,473 votes in 2016.
But the Tribunal earlier said that even if it annuls the election results in Lanao del Sur, Basilan, and Maguindanao, Robredo would have still won.
It also argued that since Marcos’ camp failed to prove that there was fraud in the recount of votes in the three pilot provinces—Camarines Sur, Iloilo, and Negros Oriental—that he chose, there was no cause to do a similar thing in the Mindanao provinces.
During the recount in October 2019, the PET said that Robredo’s lead grew by 15,000 from the 5,415 clustered precincts in the three pilot provinces.