President Arroyo’s election lawyer Romulo Macalintal said yesterday the recounting of votes sought by defeated presidential and vice presidential candidates Fernando Poe Jr. and Loren Legarda in the protest they filed before the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET) may take at least 10 years to complete.
Macalintal said the estimated time frame for the recount, or "revision," does not include the time needed for the retrieval of the ballot boxes from far-flung provinces, reproduction or copying of documents, presentation of voluminous evidence after the revision, hearings before the hearing commissioners, and technical examination of election documents.
This 10-year time frame also excludes the individual appreciation by the 15 justices of the Supreme Court of documentary and testimonial evidence from the parties involved before drawing up their respective opinion for the decision of the tribunal.
"Judging from the number of voting precincts protested by Poe and Legarda in their respective election protest cases filed with the PET, it will take an average of 4.5 years per case before the tribunal could finish the revision of the contested ballots alone," Macalintal said.
He noted that it took Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago three years to conduct the revision of only half the votes in her protest against former President Fidel Ramos in 1992 — and that the protest was only against one candidate.
The Poe and Legarda protest involves four candidates, Macalintal added.
Revision involves the recounting, examination, and appreciation of the ballots by the respective revisors of the parties involved in the protest and the recording of their observations in the Minutes of Revision Proceedings, he said.
Macalintal said Poe and Legarda are each protesting a total of 120,000 precincts where they alleged that election fraud was committed or irregularities occurred in favor of the President and Vice President Noli de Castro.
Since the ballots and other election paraphernalia of each precinct are deposited in one ballot box, at least 120,000 ballot boxes must be opened by the PET to revise the ballots from the 120,000 precincts, he said.
He said the PET usually creates 25 revision teams to conduct the revision.
"At a very conservative estimate that each revision team will finish an average of four ballot boxes a day, the 25 revision teams will have an average of 100 ballot boxes revised or finished per day," Macalintal said.
At this rate, he said, it will take the 25 revision teams an average of 1,200 days to finish revising the ballot boxes from the 120,000 protested precincts. With an average of 22 working days per month, it will take them over or four and a half years to finish the revision of ballots of the 120,000 protested precincts, he said.
"That will only apply to one contested position, either the president or vice president," Macalintal said. "There can’t be a simultaneous revision of ballots for President and Vice-President because not all (Poe) ballots have Legarda as vice president in the same vein that not all (Mrs. Arroyo’s) ballots have De Castro as vice president."
He said there are also ballots cast for presidential candidates Sen. Panfilo Lacson, former education secretary Raul Roco and evangelist Eddie Villanueva with votes for either Legarda or De Castro written on the ballots.
Macalintal said the moment the ballot box of a particular protested precinct is opened, the ballots of the protestant and the ballots of the protestee would be segregated for purposes of examination, appreciation and/or objection by their respective revisors.
Macalintal said the opening alone of the ballot box will already eat up the revision team’s precious time, considering that the condition of the ballot box has to be recorded in the minutes before it is opened.
Once opened, the condition of the inner compartment of the ballot boxes must also be recorded, including an inventory of each and every document and ballots retrieved from the ballot box, he said.
"Because of the said combination of votes for president and vice president, it would be very interesting to know how their revisors would treat such kind of ballots," Macalintal said. "Thus, it might appear awkward, if not totally ridiculous, for (Poe’s) revisors to object to ballots (for Mrs. Arroyo) where the voters voted for Legarda; or for Legarda’s revisors to object to De Castro ballots with FPJ as president."
He said the only saving grace for Poe and Legarda’s lawyers is to object to the ballots of the other presidential and vice presidential candidates.
However, even if the opposition candidates’ lawyers take this tack, Macalintal said they will not find enough votes to overcome the vote-lead enjoyed by the President and De Castro.
He said that while Poe also included in his petition a request to "recanvass" almost 10,000 election returns from about seven provinces where Mrs. Arroyo obtained 766,794 votes and Poe got only 467,938 votes, the recanvass petition alone cannot be the basis of the protest.
"This is so because even if all the aforesaid votes of (the President) are annulled the same will not affect the 1.1 million vote-lead of (Mrs. Arroyo)," Macalintal said. "More so if we consider the fact that the annulment of the said votes of (the President) would also include the exclusion of the 467,938 votes (for Poe)."