Senator Leila De Lima on Wednesday, February 6, asked the Senate Electoral Tribunal (SET) to reveal to the public the results of the recount of ballots in the electoral protest filed by former presidential adviser Francis Tolentino.
In her motion to release the results of revision and appreciation of ballots which she filed on Monday, De Lima said the Filipino people have the right to know the reason why Tolentino dropped his poll protest.
“In order to stop the misinformation and to finally stop Tolentino from playing the victim, De Lima invokes the plenary authority of the Honorable Tribunal as the ‘sole judge’ of electoral contests involving members of Congress, and urges the Honorable Tribunal to not simply grant Tolentino’s Motion and dismiss the entire protest but to make public the results of its initial determination of the concluded revision of pilot precincts pursuant to Rule 76 of the SET Rules of Procedure,” her motion read.
Tolentino, in a motion dated January 3, decided to dropped his electoral protest against the senator, more than two years after he questioned the results of the 2016 senatorial elections.
[READ: Francis Tolentino drops poll protest vs. De Lima]
In withdrawing his protest, Tolentino said he has to “indulge” himself being a senatorial aspirant now that the May 2019 midterm elections are fast approaching.
The former Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA) chair filed his protest against the opposition senator in October 2016, after the latter won the 12th or the last Senate seat in the 2016 elections, while he landed on the 13th place.
De Lima defeated Tolentino with an edge of around 1.3 million votes. Tolentino had accused the lawmaker of cheating during the 2016 polls.
The lady senator, however, expressed confidence that the SET can prove that no election fraud occurred.
“As will be confirmed by the Honorable Tribunal, Tolentino neither had a significant vote recovery nor was there a discovery of any fraud or irregularity that could substantiate his preposterous accusation,” she wrote in her motion.
“When these official results are out in the open, Tolentino can finally make peace with the fact that he was not cheated. He was defeated, and there should be no shame in that,” she added.
Tolentino, who is running under the administration’s Partido Demokratiko Pilipino-Lakas ng Bayan (PDP-Laban), had filed a motion to suspend his electoral protest against De Lima in October 2018, saying that he would just let the public decide on it.
The SET, however, denied his motion in Resolution 16-140 dated November 22, 2018.