8/9/2019 Position Paper (Set)
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RE: SET CASE NO. 001-07 AQUILINO PIMENTEL III VS. JUAN
MIGUEL
ZUBIRI
Section 17 of Article VI of the 1987 Constitution states in part
that the
Senate and the House of Representatives shall each have an
Electoral
Tribunal which shall be the sole judge of all contests relating
to the election,returns and qualifications of their respective
members.
In the landmark case of Bondoc vs. Pineda in 1991, the Senate
Electoral
Tribunal was created to function as a nonpartisan court although
two-thirds
of its members are politicians. It is a non-political body in a
sea of politicians.
As judges, the members of the tribunal must be non-partisan.
They must
discharge their functions with complete detachment,
impartiality, and
independence even independence from the political party to which
they
belong.
Though some critics say that SET Resolution No. 07-105 is linked
to the
battle for Senate Presidency, we must reiterate that no less
than the
Supreme Court said that the Electoral Commission is a body
separate from
and independent of the legislature and though not a power in
the
tripartite scheme of government, it is to all intents and
purposes, when
acting within the limits of its authority, an independent organ,
while
composed of a majority of members of the legislature it is a
body
separate from and independent of the legislature.
Prescinding from these premises, I concurred with the majority
view in SETResolution No. 07-105 without prejudice to revisiting
the ruling and
setting aside said resolution should the results of the
further
appreciation of the ballots confirm that it is statistically
improbable
for the outcome of the elections to be overturned in favor of
the
protestant or the protestee, as the case may be. While it is
true that
both protestant and protestee admitted that ballots of dubious
integrity were
discovered in the course of the revision proceedings in the
pilot precincts, it
is noteworthy to stress that at any rate, fraud or no fraud, the
verdict in
73,265 precincts may be only ascertained in due course before
the Senate
Electoral Tribunal. This is consistent with the underlying
purpose of an
election contest which is to establish who the actual winner in
the election is.
Thus, in an election contest where what is involved is the
correctness of the
number of votes of each candidate, the best and most conclusive
evidence
are the ballots themselves.
