Press Release
August 7, 2007

NENE PIMENTEL INHIBITS HIMSELF
FROM PARTICIPATING IN SET PROCEEDINGS

Senate Minority Leader Aquilino "Nene" Q. Pimentel, Jr. (PDP-Laban) is inhibiting himself from the proceedings of the Senate Electoral Tribunal (SET) where his son, Aquilino "Koko" Pimentel III has lodged an electoral protest.

The young Pimentel, who ran under the Genuine Opposition in the May 14 elections, in contesting the proclamation of Team Unity candidate Juan Miguel Zubiri as the winner of the 12th senatorial slot, claiming it was based on fraudulent grounds.

Sen. Pimentel, who is a member of the SET under the 13th Congress, said the SET members from the opposition bloc will momentarily be reorganized.

Based on the resolution of the Commission on Elections, acting as National Board of Canvassers, on July 14, Zubiri supposedly garnered 11,004,099 votes as against Pimentel's 10,984,807 votes, giving Zubiri a presumptive lead of 19,292 votes over the latter.

But Pimentel said he was overtaken by Zubiri because his rival's vote count was padded with large number of fraudulent votes from 44 municipalities in Mindanao, including 22 in Maguindanao alone.

The GO candidate is seeking a recount of votes from 2,658 precincts involving a total of 391,081 votes.

"The election results from these areas, as officially canvassed by the Commission on Elections, sitting as the National Board of Canvassers, are manufactured, padded, fraudulent, altered distorted and illegal vote totals which are not reflected of the true results of voting and counting in the protested precincts," according to the 33-page complaint filed by Pimentel and his lead counsel Leila M. de Lima.

Comelec-NBC tabulation showed that Zubiri obtained 195,823 votes in Maguindanao, representing 98.45 percent of the 198,912 voters who cast their ballots in the last elections. Pimentel said this vote count is a farce because it is statistically impossible.

"Let us open the ballot boxes and have a recount to determine whether that is true. And since Zubiri has been denying the allegation that he won because of the fraudulent votes from Maguindanao, then he should not object to the recount," Pimentel said.

The GO candidate said that the electoral protest is a cumbersome, and expensive exercise but it has to be done to prevent this election irregularity, which was perpetrated with the collusion of some Comelec officials, from being repeated and serving as a precedent or template for future elections.

The protestant will be required to shoulder the cost of retrieving and recounting the votes at P500 per ballot box. Since the protest covers 2,658 ballot boxes, the cost will be about P1.3 million. But there are other expenses to be incurred.

Pimentel said he is confident that the protest will not drag on for a long time because it involves a votes from areas roughly equivalent to the size of Caloocan City or half of Bulacan.

He said it may take from one to two months to retrieve all the ballot boxes involved and another four to six months to undertake the revision or recount of the ballots.

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