Postponement of party-list elections sought

MANILA, Philippines - A group earlier disqualified by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) asked the Supreme Court (SC) yesterday to order the postponement of the party-list elections on May 13.

In a four-page urgent motion, the 1 Ang Bagong Alyansang Tagapagtaguyod ng Adhikaing Sambayanan (1 Ang Batas) asked the high court to reset the party-list polls to October to coincide with the barangay elections.

Petitioner argued the recent ruling of the SC revising the parameters in the party-list system should apply not just to the 52 petitioners but also to all party-lists disqualified by Comelec.

The group said postponement is “necessary to rationalize the party-list system” in light of the new set of standards laid down by the high court in its recent ruling.

In postponing the party-list polls, the group requested that “the guidelines that the (SC) laid down be applied to all existing party-list groups, including those which the (Comelec) accredited and allowed to participate in the May 2013 elections.”

1 Ang Batas, among the groups whose petitions in the SC were not consolidated to the case of 52 initial groups disqualified by Comelec, invoked the equal protection clause of the Constitution in attempting to also benefit from the new guidelines.

“Applying the guidelines issued by the Court to all existing party-list groups, including those which are now ready to participate in the May 2013 elections, would in fact be fulfilling the constitutional guarantee of equal protection, and would ensure that only the party-list groups that have complied with the Honorable Court’s guidelines would be voted upon,” the group, through lawyer Maribel Alvarez-Domado, argued.

In the new six-point parameters, the SC removed the previous requirement of the Comelec for groups joining the party-list election to belong to a marginalized or underrepresented sector, which was based on the SC’s ruling in the Ang Bagong Bayani case in June 2001.