SC upholds election of Lanao del Sur town mayor

MANILA, Philippines - The Supreme Court (SC) has upheld last year’s election of Alfais Munder as mayor of Bubong, Lanao de Sur.

In a 15-page consolidated decision penned by Associate Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, the SC unanimously granted Munder’s petition to nullify and set aside the Commission on Elections (Comelec) resolution dated Oct. 4, 2010 granting the petition to disqualify him from his post for allegedly being an unregistered voter in the municipality.

The SC instead reinstated the ruling of the Comelec second division dated June 29, 2010 dismissing the petition for disqualification filed against Munder by lawyer Tago Sarip.

The SC made permanent the temporary restraining order it had issued on Jan. 18 this year in Munder’s favor.

The SC held that the grounds invoked by Sarip in his petition for disqualification against Munder were inappropriate.

It ruled that these arguments should have been raised instead in a petition to cancel Munder’s certificate of candidacy (COC). Since the two remedies vary in nature, they also vary in their prescriptive period.

A petition to cancel a COC gives a registered candidate the chance to question the qualification within five days from the last day of their filing of COCs, but not later than 25 days from the filing of the COC sought to be cancelled.

A petition for disqualification may be filed any day after the last day of the filing of COC but not later than the date of the proclamation.

In this case, the SC said the Comelec second division stated that the last day of filing the COCs was on Dec. 21, 2009. Thus, the period to file a petition to deny due course or to cancel a COC had already prescribed when Sarip filed his petition against Munder.

“It was therefore grave abuse of discretion on the part of the Comelec en banc to gloss over the issue of whether the petition was one for disqualification or for the cancellation of COC… In directly tackling the factual issues without determining whether it can properly take cognizance of the petition, the Comelec committed grave abuse of discretion,” the SC said.

Munder garnered 4,793 votes, more than twice the number obtained by Sarip who got 2,356 votes, to win the mayoral post during the 2010 national elections.