GO wants votes of 3 "cheating target" bets guarded

With some 200,000 votes still at stake in Shariff Kabungsuan in Mindanao, the Genuine Opposition (GO) is keeping tabs on the counting there to protect the votes of three of its candidates.

GO re-electionist Sen. Panfilo M. Lacson said Thursday he has been coordinating with the camps of political allies to guard the votes of his fellow GO candidates, particularly Aquilino Pimentel III, Antonio Trillanes IV, and Alan Peter Cayetano.

"In my case, I can afford to relax at this stage.  But I have not closed down my campaign headquarters.  Instead, I ordered my lawyers, and have asked some fellow senators to send paralegal volunteers to the area to guard the votes of the three," Lacson said.

He said Pimentel, Trillanes and Cayetano are now "marked targets" of the administration in its last-minute cheating efforts.  The three had been vocal against Malacañang's abuses, he pointed out.

Lacson said the GO and its allies cannot let down their guard because provincial canvassing has just started in Shariff Kabungsuan province.

Citing information from his paralegal volunteers, Lacson said figures from the provincial canvassing do not jibe with those in the municipal certificates of canvass (COCs).

"We saw erasures in the provincial canvass, especially those where we got zero votes.  Yet, the corresponding copy of the COC that we have shows we got 2,000 or 24,000 votes," he said.

He said he has warned the Commission on Elections (Comelec) officials in the area not to continue with such discrepancies, saying the GO will question the figures once they reach Manila.

"If they insist on going ahead with those irregularities, they will only be delaying the proclamation of winners," he said.