Poe to fellow bets: No more dirty tactics

MANILA, Philippines – Sen. Grace Poe, saddled by successive attempts to disqualify her as a presidential candidate, said the electorate deserves more than just dirty tactics, all aimed at bringing down the opponents of the candidate behind them.

With the start of the new year, Poe appealed to her fellow candidates to abandon petty politics and make the presidential campaign a battle of platforms for a better government.

“We’re all coming into 2016 with a clean slate. We can use this chance to elevate the level of discourse in the campaign. I think everyone will agree that Filipinos deserve no less from us,” Poe said.

“I presume we all want the same thing for the country, which is, ultimately, to uplift the lives of our fellow Filipinos. Let us not make this about personal ambitions because if we do, the tendency is to employ all means, even dirty tactics, to eliminate those who stand in our way,” she added.

Earlier in the campaign, Poe said she was told by some well-meaning people that her problem was that she had “no black ops” like some of her opponents.

However, Poe said she and her running mate Sen. Francis Escudero had always maintained they would stick to a positive campaign.

“We do not fight that way. The battle we wage is based on our platform—what we can do for our poor countrymen, the farmers, the laborers who still suffer from low wages. These are the matters that we must focus on,” she said.

After hurdling a disqualification case before the Senate Electoral Tribunal, Poe suffered a setback at the hands of the Commission on Elections (Comelec), which decided to remove her as a presidential candidate on the basis of four petitions filed against her.

The petitions were all related to questions about her citizenship and residency.

As a foundling whose biological parents are unknown, Poe was not considered a natural-born Filipino.

On the issue of her residency, inspite of her attempts to explain an error in her entry during the 2013 senatorial elections, Poe was deemed lacking in the required time an individual needed to be in the country for purposes of running for public office.

Poe has since taken the matter to the Supreme Court where she managed to secure a temporary restraining order on the Comelec so that her name would remain in the list of presidential candidates.             

Escudero aired his confidence that the Supreme Court would side with Poe in her battle to qualify as a candidate for president in this May’s election.

Escudero said the issuance by the Supreme Court of a temporary restraining order last Monday on the implementation by the Comelec gave him and Poe even more confidence that they would win the case.

“We have no doubts. We have complete trust on the truth being on the side of Senator Grace. Based on the law and the facts of the case, we are expecting that the Court would side with her,” Escudero said in an interview over dwIZ.

Escudero urged the Supreme Court to come out with a ruling at the soonest possible time so that the matter of getting Poe on the ballot for the May elections would already be settled.

No legal standing

Petitioners in the disqualification cases filed with the Comelec against Poe cannot ask the poll body to delete her name from the ballots, election lawyer Romulo Macalintal said yesterday.

Macalintal said former senator Francisco Tatad, lawyer Estrella Elamparo and Antonio Contreras have no legal standing to request the Comelec to drop Poe from the ballots, “since they are not candidates for president in the 2016 elections.”

Under Comelec rules, he said only “real parties in interest” or candidates can make a deletion request even if the same rules allow “any registered voter to file a verified petition to deny due course to or cancel the COC (certificate of candidacy) for any elective office.”

Macalintal added the rules provide that real parties in interest are those who “stand to benefit or be injured” by the inclusion or dropping of a candidate’s name from the ballots.

He pointed out that Tatad, Elamparo and Contreras “have no legal capacity or personality to ask the Comelec to delete Poe’s name from the official list or official ballots because such action is no longer legal but already in the realm of politics.”

“They do not ‘stand to benefit or be injured’ by the inclusion or deletion of Poe’s name in the ballots since they are not running for president,” he stressed.

On the basis of the complaints of the three, who claim that the senator is not qualified to seek the presidency, the Comelec has disqualified her. She appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, which stopped the poll body from enforcing its ruling.  –  With  Jess Diaz