Comelec chair Bautista fails to get CA confirmation
Comelec Chairman Andres Bautista at the Comelec office in Manila. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO/ARNOLD ALMACEN
Commission on Elections (Comelec) chairman Andres Bautista and another official failed to get the confirmation of the powerful Commission on Appointments (CA) on Wednesday over the alleged missing results involving 12 million votes in 2013.
It was Senate Minority Leader Juan Ponce Enrile who asked for the deferment of the confirmation of Bautista and Commissioner Sheriff Abas during the hearing of the CA’s committee on constitutional commissions.
Enrile asked Bautista if he was familiar with the letter of Henrietta de Villa, the national chairperson of the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting, about the election results from the 18,486 precincts in the country during the 2013 elections.
Bautista answered in the negative, to which Enrile told the Comelec chair to familiarize with the issue “because I will require you to submit a report to this commission before we confirm you.”
“Because this involves the fate of 18,486 precincts in the country during that election, representing about 12 million votes which still have no any electronic or manual count of votes all over the country and all over the world including the overseas of the countries so I’d like to know if Comelec did any disposition of this report. And why it was not published to the public at that time,” said the senator.
Enrile, who was under hospital arrest for more than a year over the pork barrel scam, said he had a copy of the report, which was given to him in “secret.”
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He also said that based on the information, there was an alleged ratio or a program of 60-30 and 10 in that election.
“There has never been any public discussion of this in the media, there has never been any revelation of this secret to the press and since we’re going to use the same Smartmatic program and machine in the upcoming election, we have the right, the people have the right to know what happened to [these] 18,486 precincts…?” Enrile said.
“If you can’t produce that information to us and I’ll tell you now, you will not be confirmed here,” he added.
Responding to Enrile’s queries, Bautista said: “My understanding is that the transmission in 2013 was 77 percent but the remaining [was] manually uploaded and as I said by way of a general strategy, the Comelec would like to learn from its mistakes in 2010 and 2013…”
“I was also told that the allegedly missing results are not missing. They were simply not electronically transmitted. They were instead manually uploaded…in accordance with published rules…” said the Comelec chair.
Bautista said he was also told that a report on De Villa’s letter had already been submitted to the joint congressional oversight committee.
But Enrile insisted that Bautista should submit to the committee a written report on the matter. The senator also used the same grounds to move for the deferment of Abas’ confirmation. Maila Ager/RAM
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