News Roundup 11 May 2022
May 11, 2022 • 5 min Read
Robredo tells supporters: I hope there is no regret in our hearts and souls | INQUIRER.NET – Presidential candidate Vice President Leni Robredo expressed hope her supporters do not regret joining and offering anything they can during the elections. “I hope that there is no regret in our hearts and souls,” Robredo said in her native Bicol, addressing the attendees during the solidarity and thanksgiving mass at the Naga Metropolitan Cathedral in this city on Tuesday night. “We know that we did everything. All the diligence, all the sacrifices, not just mine, but especially yours. I saw what you offered for the elections. I hope that what we have offered, we can carry on with us for the bigger fight that is to come for all of us,” she added. The mass, celebrated by Archbishop Rolando Octavus Tirona Tria and organized by Solid Leni Bicol, was held less than a day after the May 9 election polls closed and as frontrunner Ferdinand Marcos Jr. widened his apparent lead. Robredo once again assured her supporters that “we feel what you are feeling.” “We feel the same thing. We want you to know that your worries and anger, we carry that as well,” she said. She also reiterated what she said in an earlier statement that they will not neglect the reports of irregularities during the elections. Robredo reminded her supporters to put their sadness, anger, and desperation to good use. She said that her supporters could either use it for something “that would make us more divided” or they can use it to introduce new changes. She also said that no matter what the result of the election will be, she hopes that her supporters will accept it. “While we are all grieving the results of the elections, no matter what the final result is, let us accept it because that will be the source of our strength,” she said, while stressing that no one should forget the irregularities involving. “There are bigger fights,” she said. Various protests in Naga City and in other Bicol towns and cities have sparked since the evening of Monday, election day.
Poll watchdogs urge blacklisting of Smartmatic; Comelec stands by certification | PHILSTAR.COM – On Day 3 of the Commission on Elections’ canvassing of votes, poll watchdog groups labelled the 2022 polls a failure that they attributed to election software provider Smartmatic, after widespread technical glitches led to thousands of voters being stranded in their precincts for hours. To recall, the Comelec ahead of May 9 largely touted its retrofitted systems for this year’s polls, saying these adjustments were meant to allow for as much transparency as possible by limiting human discretion through automation. Under the system, a separate transparency server allows the media and the public to keep pace with the count through its Public Results Website. Speaking in an interview aired over ABS-CBN’s TeleRadyo, Kontra Daya convenor Danilo Arao said that all the complaints the group received on May 9 had something to do with the delays caused by the countless glitches around the country. “This is heartbreaking and this is concrete anecdotal evidence that Smartmatic failed and must be blacklisted. They must be sent out of the country and Comelec must investigate the lapses and problems and not say they are minor problems,” he said. Arao’s group was among those calling for an extension to the voting hours after many voters were still in line an hour before the election was officially scheduled to end. These calls, however, ultimately went unheeded. Arao called this a case of potential voter disenfranchisement. In a separate interview aired over ABS-CBN News Channel, National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections president Gus Lagman said that the current automated voting process is “not transparent” because it only allows voters to see receipts of their vote and not the actual votes transmitted for canvassing later on. “The manual counting at the precinct level would take maybe five hours. The canvassing in the past would take more than a month. But canvassing should be automated,” he said. “This one, they saw the counting of those votes…and they can use that as a basis for comparing the results during canvassing.” He shared the opinion that Smartmatic should be blacklisted in the country, adding that he “had been campaigning for [that] since 2010.” Doing this, he said, would necessitate the Comelec passing a resolution declaring so. “First of all, I’m against the use of automation at the precinct level. It should only be in electronic transmission and the canvassing but at the precinct level it should be manual so voters can see how their votes were counted,” he said. “They’ve fallen in love I guess with automation…but there are many ways of automating a system, but I’m saying automate it from the electronic transmission all the way to the canvassing. That’s what you’d call hybrid, and the number of people supporting hybrid system is growing.” Even in the face of countless allegations casting doubt overn the conduct and integrity of the elections, Comelec commissioner George Garcia has been quick to point out that nothing has been proven yet. He claimed many of these were simply a result of “election fever.” “It’s not just hardware and software, but the totality of the electoral process, and that includes transmission, even the transmission routers were all tested and certified…everything was checked, and this is different from the local source code review,” Comelec spokesperson John Rex Laudiangco told reporters at a press briefing Wednesday afternoon.
Comelec proclaims Jerry Treñas as Iloilo City mayor | INQUIRER.NET – The Commission on Elections (Comelec) on Wednesday, May 11, proclaimed incumbent Iloilo City Mayor Jerry Treñas as the winning candidate in the May 9 elections. Treñas garnered 187, 691 votes while his opponents, Jun Capulot and Vicente Ang, received 54, 552 and 789 votes respectively. Treñas was proclaimed together with his running mate Vice Mayor Jeffrey Ganzon.
