Cardema petition won’t get approval – Guanzon

MANILA, Philippines — The Duterte Youth party-list group’s second attempt to name former National Youth Commission chair Ronald Cardema as its nominee is unlikely to get the nod of the Commission on Elections (Comelec), an official said yesterday.

Comelec Commissioner Rowena Guanzon said Cardema’s motion for  reconsideration (MR) and the new set of nominees filed by his group are conflicting petitions.

“If it’s an MR and they submitted a new list, to me, I will construe it as having given up his MR. And we will now rely on his submission of new set of nominees,” she explained.

The MR, she said, will require at least four votes from the seven-man panel to reverse the decision of the First Division declaring him as ineligible for being overaged as a youth sector representative.

“It is going to be difficult, in my own analysis, because when Duterte Youth applied for accreditation, the Second Division ruled, in a vote of 2-1, denied their petition for registration. And the ground for Cardema’s disqualification is an open and shut case: he is overaged. And it is all there in our decision, which is 2-0,” Guanzon, a member of the First Division, said in a television interview.

She also believes that the new set of party-list nominees was filed way past the May 13 deadline.

She said the Comelec hopes to resolve both the MR and the substitute nominees within a month.