The delay in the confirmation of Commission on Elections Chairman Sixto Brillantes is actually due to an electoral protest in Taguig City and not a sincere desire to have clean elections, retired Supreme Court Justice Dante O. Tiñga said yesterday.
The retired magistrate said Senate Minority Leader Alan Cayetano, a member of the Commission on Appointments, delayed the approval of Brillantes’ appointment because he wanted to indefinitely delay the recount of Taguig’s mayoral election which Cayetano’s wife Lani won by a slim margin.
“The senator is really not interested in seeing an appointee who has a “roadmap towards clean and honest elections,” as he calls it, but someone whom he personally likes, to head the Comelec,” said Tinga, who was also a Taguig congressman.
“His underlying motive is to prevent the Comelec from retrieving the ballot boxes and delay the resolution of the protest until the end of his wife’s stint,” Tinga added.
Although Tinga lost by only a slim margin, all the candidates in his slate –the vice-mayor, two congressmen, and 16 councilors — won with big margins.
Tinga lamented that Comelec officials now appear to be pressured by the senator’s “parliamentary bullying and intimidating press releases” after his protest was “unjustifiably” transferred to the commission’s First Division which has not issued a single retrieval order despite the lapse of nearly three months.
He noted that the First Division had already issued retrieval orders for all the cases docketed ahead of his protest. In all those cases, except for another protest case in Dumaguete City, the ballot boxes had already been or are about to be retrieved
In a protest case from San Jose City, Nueva Ecija which bears a higher docket number than Tinga’s protest, the ballots were not only retrieved but also revised.
Full Article: Tiñga: Taguig recount snags Brillantes appointment | Metro.