New President, VP declared
The two chambers of Congress will convene Wednesday to formally proclaim Liberal Party (LP) Senator Benigno S. Aquino III the winner in the May 10 presidential race and declare him president-elect.
To be proclaimed with Aquino during the 2 p.m. joint session is Makati City Mayor Jejomar Binay of the Pwersa ng Masang Pilipino who won the vice presidential derby over LP bet Sen. Manuel “Mar” Roxas II.
The 18-man Joint Congressional National Canvassing Committee will present before the joint session its committee report showing the results of the tabulation of 278 certificates of canvass (CoC).
Jointly chaired by Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile and Speaker Prospero Nograles, the panel of lawmakers concluded its eight-day canvass with the opening and counting of the CoC from Lanao del Sur.
The delivery of the Lanao del Sur CoC was delayed due to the holding of special elections in three localities in the province. The CoC was expected to be transmitted or manually delivered to the Batasan Pambansa complex by 3 p.m. Tuesday.
Aquino and Binay will be proclaimed president-elect and vice president-elect, respectively, after the two chambers of Congress will have voted separately on the committee report and the adoption of the resolution of proclamation.
Under the rules, any member who will speak for or against the resolution and the committee reports will be given no more than 10 minutes to air their piece. A one-hour cloture rule will be imposed to put an end to the debate.
As agreed by the joint committee, the winning candidates will be invited to witness the proclamation.
Aquino and Binay were expected to personally appear during the joint session proceedings that will start at 2 p.m. at the Batasan Pambansa session hall in Quezon City.
Actually, Aquino and Binay have already been assured of proclamation after the canvassing committee junked Monday night a last-ditch effort by Roxas’ lawyers to seek the counting of some three million votes that might reverse an apparent victory of the Makati mayor in the vice presidential race.
After deciding to tabulate the result in the Davao City CoC, Aquino’s vote ballooned to 15,072,053, which is 5,601,024 points over that of nearest rival, ex-President Joseph Estrada who received 9,471,029 votes.
Binay, on the other hand, enjoyed a 611,955 margin over Roxas. The Makati City mayor accounted for 14,501,371 votes out of the 34,901,624 total votes cast. Roxas chalked 13,889,416 votes.
Only 300,000 votes were to be canvassed for the Lanao del Sur CoC.
The joint committee voted to turn down the appeal of Joey Tenefrancia, Roxas' counsel, for the conduct of random manual counts in various regions that accounted for 2.6 million null votes.
Also thumbed down were motions to count all votes where the threshold of count that would result in early proclamation was lowered and include votes in areas that erroneously transmitted results of final testing and sealing of the PCOS machines instead of the actual results of votes.
The erroneous transmission involving 92,000 votes were noted in certain localities in Cavite, Bulacan, Leyte, Nueva Ecija, Maguindanao, North Cotabato, and Bulacan.
Tenefrancia said 162,000 votes were not counted correctly due to the erroneous transmission of results to the canvassing panel.
Before taking up Tenefrancia’s appeal, the joint committee met in an executive session to decide on counting the certificates of canvass from Davao City and Lanao del Sur to complete the count of 278 CoCs.
http://www.mb.com.ph/node/261158/congre